


we splinter into wholes

by futuredescending



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Angst, Harry Hart Lives, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6129980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a strange look in Merlin’s eye when Arthur hands him the thick mission brief.</p>
<p>He finds out why when he opens the folder to learn about the man he’s been ordered to kill and sees Eggsy’s face staring back up at him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first thing Harry Hart says when he’s not only conscious but _cognisant_ of his surroundings is not a word at all so much as a muddled noise pushed out from between his teeth after he manages to unglue his fuzzy tongue from the roof of his mouth. After a few grateful sips of tepid water administered via straw from a hand attached to an owner he can’t quite make out, he thankfully finds himself able to articulate the profundity of his existence.

“Fuck.”

“I’m happy to see your gift for the poetic turn of phrase remains as sharp as ever,” Merlin says from somewhere to his right (peripheral vision is not something Harry can count among his skillset at the moment). At some cost, Harry manages to lilt his head to the side to catch blurry sight of his oldest and best friend. The bastard doesn’t even glance up from whatever is consuming his attention on his tablet.

Harry tries to lift a hand with the intent to do something, maybe flip the other man off, but his thoughts are as scattered as a sandstorm. He loses the plot somewhere during his attempt to voluntarily raise his hand from its place at his side and falls asleep instead.

 

____

 

So it goes. The pattern of his life for the next few weeks is seemingly a never-ending cycle of vague consciousness and dreams. It usually goes like this:

Wake from medicated sleep.

Sluggishly try to recall the how, what, where, and why. To be honest, some of those details still remain an unknown quantity.

Remember once again that he’s been shot in the fucking head and he’s still alive, for better or worse. Probably worse.

Let the siren call of slumber pull him back under.

Repeat, ad nauseam.

But bit by bit, Harry’s partially shattered brain slowly heals. Forms new connections and pathways of thought. Brain elasticity is a medical marvel that not even Kingsman fully understands yet.

When he can remain alert for longer stretches of time and retain his short-term memory, it finally dawns on him to ask, like he’s just recalled a missing limb.

“Merlin, where’s Eggsy?”

Merlin’s face grows pinched in the way it does when he doesn’t like something but has to bite back his words. “Eggsy’s fine. He stopped Valentine and saved the world, you know. Him and Lancelot.”

“That’s not an answer,” Harry says, and doesn’t know why he feels a pang in his chest.

“Just concentrate on your recovery, Galahad,” Merlin tells him seriously.

Harry wants to argue, but even his own body is against him on this, and he falls asleep before he can demand an explanation.

 

____

 

The bionic eye feels like a metal parasite in his face and gives him pounding migraines if he strains his vision for too long. It’s too foreign, an imposition. Every cell in his body protests its presence.

“Give it time,” Merlin tells him. “What’s left of your brain isn’t used to the extreme input yet.”

Harry is tempted to rip the damn thing out—how much more damage to the apparent porridge of his brain could it do?—and tell Merlin where he can shove it, but unimpaired vision is vital in securing his reinstatement to his former title. As is learning how to have full control of his limbs again in order to perform critical functions such as, for instance, walking.

For having suffered a gunshot wound to absolutely none of his limbs, Harry has the fine motor control of a six month old. He’s wheelchair bound for weeks before they gift him with the indignity of a walker. Harry makes it about two steps before his legs turn to jelly and he nearly falls flat on his face.

“Merlin,” Harry says, aching, sweaty, and out of breath from having done little more than stand up for the past two hours. It’s all very upsetting and humiliating, and when he feels this vulnerable, he has a nasty habit of picking fights. “Are you ever going to tell me—”

Merlin sighs, visibly hesitates, and then finally admits, “Eggsy is no longer with Kingsman, Harry. Arthur—our new Arthur—has chosen to uphold the rules. Eggsy failed. He’s out.”

There must be something dreadful in Harry’s face, maybe in his eyes, because Merlin is quick to add, “I’ve tried to keep an eye on him when I could. Last I checked, the boy was as well as could be expected.”

It’s not much. It’s a great deal worse than not much. Merlin, who is pulled in a hundred different directions at once these days, who already spends far too much of his time at Harry’s bedside than he ought to or can even really afford, does not have the time to watch over a washed out candidate. Even one who saved the world.

Eggsy may have been the one who failed Kingsman’s trials, but it’s Harry who failed him first.

 

____

 

Weeks turn into months, wherein every step forward is its own waged war. Harry battles his ruined body, which does not bounce back from catastrophes as quickly nor as well as it once had. He battles a newly crowned Arthur, who makes polite noises and inquires as to Harry’s physical and mental health, then implies that perhaps it is time for Harry to hang up his sword and shield.

He battles his fellow agents, some of whom had to be replaced after V-Day and are completely unknown to Harry. They are young, terribly fit, and treat Harry like a doddering pensioner they have to humour.

He’s an old warhorse among young stallions, but he would rather die on the battlefield, not peacefully in his bed. Harry needs this life as much as he needs oxygen. He has crafted and remade the whole of himself into a Kingsman agent, as bespoke to it as the suits that hug and drape over his frame.

To his eternal shame, he does not reach out to Eggsy once during his recovery and does not ask Merlin for any more updates. At first, it is because Kingsman still doesn’t allow him access to any communication with the outside world until he can learn how to tie his own bloody shoes again, but even after he’s allowed to return to his home under limited supervision, something prevents him from looking at the matter too closely.

There is a regrettable streak of pride and vanity that runs through him, he knows. And in many ways, he is a coward. Once upon a time, he swept into Eggsy’s life as his dashing knight in shining armour, worldly and at the top of his game. The boy had looked up to him with something approaching reverence, and that had been a heady feeling.

Now Harry spends a half hour more trying to tame his hair into submission, because he has more thick, ugly scars to hide and the parts that have regrown after being shaved have come in shockingly white, coarse, and unruly. Sometimes his right hand trembles uncontrollably and he spills the contents of his glass all over himself. Sometimes he slurs his words or forgets them entirely, stuttering and blinking stupidly like the old fool most think him to be now. Sometimes the migraines cripple him and it’s all he can do to keep from shrivelling up into a ball. He can’t delude himself into thinking that the only look Eggsy would look give him now would be one of pity.

Or anger, because That Day, with all its harsh words traded like blows, still haunts him.

Like the guilt and regret that had prompted him to keep his distance from Lee Unwin’s family after his death, it’s too tempting to maintain a myopic view of the narrow path before him, not the wreckage that lies in his wake.

Like father, like son after all.

 

____

 

Finally, there comes a point when no more excuses can be made in their unspoken standoff. Harry is stubborn and unflinching and eventually it is Arthur who blinks first.

“Welcome back, Galahad,” Arthur stiffly says and invites Harry to reclaim his rightful seat at the dining room table. “Here is your first assignment.”

“Glasses, gentlemen,” Merlin says and it feels like coming home.

As it would happen, blowing up the heads of the world’s leaders in one fell swoop tends to have a few devastating consequences: vacuums of power others scramble to fill, destabilisation of whole regimes and countries. Britain has fared better than most—turns out there is still some use for the monarchy after all, and the Queen remains a beloved stalwart figure as ever—but there is a new homegrown criminal organisation coalescing and rising through the ranks, either by knocking off or absorbing their rivals. Previously, Kingsman had been preoccupied with more prominent and immediate threats elsewhere, and this one had the time and perfect conditions to incubate right under their nose.

“They’re in the business of the usual sins: gambling, drugs, weapons, money laundering and extortion,” Merlin explains.

Of course, it’s this last that has finally put them on their radar. Blackmailing what’s left of the powerful and elite does not engender much good will, and now it has befallen Kingsman to uproot this particularly trenchant weed.

“They’re starting to make inroads into the Continent, so we have to move quickly and decisively. Your mission, Galahad, is to cut the head off the snake so we can kick off the process of dismantling this element from the top down.”

A kill order then. This, Harry understands. Knock off the leader and create enough confusion so that other legal entities can come in and clean house. Kingsman has done it many, many times before, with other criminal empires that were far older, better funded, and more powerful. It’s not so easy an assignment as to be insulting, but Harry can see how it’s meant to cautiously test him.

Complete this mission, and he’ll have firmly cemented his field status. Complete this mission, and there will be no more questions as to his fitness or mental acuity. Harry is ready. No, he is _eager_.

There is a strange look in Merlin’s eye when Arthur hands him the thick mission brief.

He finds out why when he opens the folder to learn about the man he’s been ordered to kill and sees Eggsy’s face staring back up at him.

 

____

 

“Explain,” is the first thing Harry demands when they’re safely in the blackout confines of Merlin’s private office.

To his credit, Merlin has the grace to look contrite. He doesn’t embellish his words with empty platitudes. “When Eggsy was officially dismissed from Kingsman, he had gone to confront his step-father, who, unfortunately, made it through V-Day just fine.”

Returning for unfinished business. Harry distantly remembers that he must have interrupted Eggsy’s first attempt at seeking retribution with his timely recall of the taxi.

“During the confrontation, it so transpired that one Dean Baker was rushed to hospital where he later died from his injuries.”

Harry is no stranger to death, but he finds himself with the pressing need to sit down for the weakness in his knees. The nearest flat surface is the edge of Merlin’s desk, and for once, Merlin, who is more territorial than a pit bull, doesn’t remark on it.

“How could this have happened?” he finds himself asking and hates the way his voice sounds so lost.

Merlin adjusts his glasses and shifts uncomfortably, a rare tell that frightens him in a way facing down a room of heavily armed men does not. “I helped make it go away. I’d given Eggsy one last favour when he was dismissed. I owed him at least that, and he called it in. Afterwards, he made it clear all debts had been paid up, a fine kiss off if ever there was one, and promptly disappeared from the grid. I didn’t look hard enough to find him. Next time he popped up on our radar was when we learned the Wembley Boys had been wiped out.”

It’s easy to dismiss Eggsy. By doing so, Harry supposes he, too, can give himself a pass. He can argue that Eggsy had nothing left to lose. Reduce him back down to his class and tragic upbringing and do everything Eggsy hates about snobs like him.

And to his horror, he already finds himself doing it. Wanting to. But having nothing left to lose doesn’t mean Eggsy had left Kingsman with _nothing_.

The harsh reality is that Eggsy left Kingsman a trained killer, many times over, righteously, personally, and brutally.

Harry doesn’t mourn Dean Baker’s passing. Of course not. He mourns the boy Eggsy had once been.

“Why did you let me believe he was fine?” Harry asks.

Merlin’s shoulders slump, but he doesn’t look surprised. He’s been expecting this question for a long time coming. “Because you were barely hanging on as it was. All the doctors had written you off, Harry. You weren’t supposed to wake up, then you weren’t suppose to exceed the mental capacity of a three-year-old. You were, at best, going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. Maybe have a full or partial caretaker assigned to you. Most people don’t come back from this, much less re-qualify for agent status.”

His recovery, when framed like that, sounds like he narrowly avoided the edge. What was at stake yawns up at him like a gaping abyss. Harry has never suffered from a fear of heights, but the very thought makes him dizzy and breathless.

“And after?” he presses.

Merlin levels him with a scrutinising look. “Why didn’t you ever ask?”

Stalemate. They both know each other too well.

“Arthur has to know of the conflicts of interest inherent in this assignment,” Harry finally says.

“Arthur is waiting for you to fail.”

“I’d gathered as much.”

“What will you do? Can you really kill that boy, Harry?” But Harry hears the silent, _should you?_

It’s a question he doesn’t want to examine, not here, not in the belly of the beast and beneath Merlin’s too perceptive gaze. So Harry hardens his mouth and his eyes and his heart, and says, “He’s not a boy anymore, Merlin.”

 

____

 

After considering the angles, he starts his hunt where it all began.

He walks into The Black Prince on a sleepy, unassuming weekday afternoon and orders a pint of Guinness.

He sits where he had first sat over two years ago now and uses the daylight that seeps in through the bottle glass windows to take note of the few patrons in the pub with him.

There is the drunk fixture slumped over the bar with a still smoking cigarette pinched between his fingers. There is the bartender who doesn’t remember Harry. There are three men from Dean’s gang sitting in the dark corner who do.

Harry watches them. They watch him back.

Unaffected, he takes his time in finishing his pint, doesn’t waste a single drop, and then gets up and leaves. They don’t follow him out.

Harry goes home that night and dreams about that first time in the pub after picking Eggsy up from the police station, except he teaches dance lessons to Dean’s gang instead of leaving them in a heap of battered bodies on the sticky floor. Eggsy still looks up at him, some unknowable expression shining in his eyes.

 

____

 

He times his return to much later in the evening. The pub is markedly busier, and he has no sooner caught the bartender’s attention when he senses the weight of their brooding presence at his back.

“Gentleman,” he says congenially as he turns around and narrows his gaze at one brutish man in consideration. “I believe you had a tooth knocked loose during our last encounter. Tell me, how’s the mouth faring now?”

The man starts forward as if he wants to impart some firsthand experience for an answer, but he visibly restrains himself almost as soon as he begins, a dog called to heel long ago.

The other one—tall, thin, _Rottie_ , Harry believes is the moniker—steps forward and tries to broaden his weedy stance into intimidation. “Guv would like a word. You can come along quietly and this goes easy like, you get me?” Undoubtedly, he still keeps a revolver in the back waistband of his jeans.

Harry blinks as if taken aback by their aggression and then makes a open-handed conciliatory gesture. “Well, by all means. Please lead the way.”

Rottie lays a heavy hand on his shoulder that makes Harry clench his teeth, but he allows himself to be led out of the pub, flanked by Dean’s—now Eggsy’s, he supposes—men. As soon as they emerge into the cool night, an obnoxiously detailed GT350 Mustang pulls up to the kerb and Harry is unceremoniously shoved into the rear seats.

Fortunately for the sake of his knees, they don’t have far to go and are, in fact, still in South London. They pull up to the back of a newly renovated building. Harry can already hear and feel the throbbing bass booming from within the club’s walls.

Rottie knocks on the nearly seamless back door, which is promptly opened from the inside for them. He is led down a dark, narrow corridor. It’s not as loud as it would be out on the main dance floor, but the music is still percussive enough to drown out most everything else, including the brief words Rottie exchanges with what appears to be a club bouncer.

Harry’s real eye can’t make out very much, but his bionic one has night vision that pierces every shadowy corner. It reveals far more armed men guarding this small, enclosed space than one would assume was necessary.

It takes him a while to realise that despite his outward appearance of calm, it isn’t the manic, driving beat rattling through his bones, it’s his heart pounding rapidly in his chest.

Rottie knocks on another door to his left, pauses for some sort of assent, then opens it and steps through. The other man behind Harry gives him a hard shove, and he staggers into room.

The office is large, designed to look like a private VIP room in a club than any place of official administration, dripping in rich reds, excessively cushioned surfaces, and dim atmospheric club lighting.

“Check him for weapons,” a hauntingly familiar voice orders from the back.

Eggsy’s hair has grown even longer, long enough to reveal a slight wave. There is something leonine about it.

His suit, while not bespoke, is well tailored, all lean lines, close fit, and subtle flashy sheen. He pairs it with expensive trainers in the affably defiant manner that young, fashionable men these days like to do, though his tastes have been tamed down from the winged contraptions he’d once sported.

Eggsy is as Harry remembers him, and he is not. Familiar and foreign at once. He looks older. Leaner. Predatory. Something’s carved the youthful softness out of him. Harry was right: there are no traces of the boy in the man before him anymore. But it was one thing to say it and another to have it personally and unquestionably confirmed.

Rottie takes to the rough pat down. He finds Harry’s shoulder piece first, the only obvious weapon Harry carries on his person, and holds it aloft victoriously like a proud pet, thinking he’s done.

But Eggsy shakes his head. “Empty his pockets. Everything goes.”

“What? All he gots is his mobile and some fancy fuck lighter,” Rottie complains.

“I said take everything out. Glasses, ring, watch, shoes, belt, tie, and jacket too. And don’t fuck around with any of ‘em if you know what’s good for you.”

Rottie mutters something derogatory, but follows Eggsy’s word to the letter.

His gaze never leaves Eggsy’s as he is stripped of all his weaponised accessories and the most vital pieces of his armour, until he is standing before him in nothing more than his dress shirt, trousers, and socks.

He sees Eggsy’s appraisal slide up and down his body as searing as a brand and feels more naked than if he hadn’t been left with a stitch on at all.

When they are finally left alone, Eggsy breaks the silence first. “Resurrection’s a good look on you, bruv. Digging the silver fox bit. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you faked the whole thing for a laugh.”

Eggsy’s tone is light, but that hard glittering facade, polished to obsidian, never changes. He gives nothing away anymore. Harry never realised how much of Eggsy was present in his countenance until its absence. The last expression he’d seen on Eggsy’s face was sorrow.

It’s surprisingly difficult to keep looking at Eggsy’s face, now that he knows. He swallows past a thick lump in his throat and says, “Believe me when I say that wasn’t the case six months ago.”

“Yeah, well, guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, seeing as how no one told me.”

“I was given the impression you had wanted to cut off all ties with Kingsman.”

Eggsy opens his mouth and then closes it. Harry can see the tic in the muscle around his jaw. Whatever he was going to say is swiftly substituted with a more purposely indifferent, “I could take a hint. Know when I wasn’t wanted. ‘Sides, didn’t see you giving me a ring.”

And what did Harry have to say to that? Nothing. Nothing.

The muffled music leaking in through the walls gives the silence between them a mass that is so heavy and brittle, Harry is almost afraid to breathe in it.

But Eggsy doesn’t seem to be in a hurry now that he’s dragged Harry here. He’s leaning against the front of his desk, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his broad chest. Like he could wait Harry out forever if he wanted.

Perhaps he could now. Patience was never one of Harry’s virtues. “What are you doing, Eggsy?”

It seems to be the question Eggsy was waiting for this whole time. He’s shaking his head, a bitter smile curling at the edges of his mouth, and nearly rolling his eyes before Harry can finish speaking. “Spare me the paternal disappointment. That ship’s sailed a year ago, bruv. I’ve been fulfilling my potential, is what I’m doing. Got me a respectable business now. Doing well for meself too. I’m right chuffed.”

“Killing. Gun running. Blackmail. Selling drugs. Yes, I can see you have quite the operation to be proud of. Look how far you’ve come.”

“You still don’t know shit about me,” Eggsy says. Snarls, really. There is a dangerous undercurrent that lashes through his voice, a hint of real anger that belies his carefree demeanour.

The crack in his facade seems to disconcert him, shakes him from his immovable poise. Eggsy straightens up, simmering with coiled tension, and turns his back to Harry. He wields his focus to his desk, picking up and tossing the various papers and folders that clutter it. “What do you really want, Harry?”

“Beg pardon? I thought it was you who ordered your pack of dogs to bring me here. By the way, how does it feel laying whip to the men who used to beat you up for sport? Must have been an unanticipated but nice side benefit to killing your step-father.”

Harry can’t see his face, but he can witness the way Eggsy’s shoulders hunch up, the way he holds himself back, trembling with rage, before stilling completely. “You show up to my pub first, acting like the posh prick you are, and you think you can—”

Harry strikes.

He’s gotten close enough to Eggsy to snake his arm around his neck and draw him into a choke hold. Reflexively, Eggsy arches towards him, hands clawing at Harry’s arm, ready to throw Harry off using his immense flexibility and strength.

He’s a live wire in Harry’s grasp.

So Harry presses in closer, lays his cheek against Eggsy’s cheek, feels the heat emanating from his flushed skin, and breathes in the expensive cologne Eggsy lightly dabbed onto his collar just like Harry taught him as he slides a foot between Eggsy’s legs to wrap around his ankle, then shoots his other knee into the small of Eggsy’s back and lets them both topple back to the floor.

The impact knocks the air from his lungs, but he holds on, pulls and bends Eggsy to him as he would a lover, and drives his knee in just a little harder. Eggsy’s fingers dig into his arm, sure to leave bruises.

The choked off gurgles Eggsy makes are horrendous. They are not so different from sobbing.

Harry stares up at the tin ceiling tiles and waits.

 

____

 

Eggsy’s body slackens. Harry’s existence shatters into fragments.

His focus is scattershot, objects jumping in and out of notice like apparitions in the descending haze. Ceiling, banquette seating, the plush crimson rug underneath them. Eggsy’s pale hand unfurled against it. His body is a heavy pietà over him.

He wishes he had Merlin in his ear to rein him in. As it is, he must do it for himself. He calls upon every ounce of training and discipline he’s earned over the decades, and gradually the world is reduced back down to a droning bass and clear path of next steps.

There are six armed guards in the hall, two flanking the door, two at each end of the corridor. The corridor is less than six metres wide. The lighting comes from the exit sign, office, and the flashing lights of the main room beyond and far around the corner.

He leaves Eggsy sprawled out on the floor and rolls to his feet.

He walks over to the door and throws it open, letting the music flood in, a barrage of underwater-sounding murmurs underscored with deep growling notes.

The men on either side are too startled to react when Harry throws an elbow at the temple of one, wraps an arm around the neck of the other, and swings him out into the centre of the corridor, peeling his gun from his holster and using him as a human shield to take out the two guards on one end and then completing his revolution to take aim at the last two on the other.

The latter manage to get a shot off each before he drops them in two precise shots. Harry feels the bullets impact the thick body he holds close and soon his shield becomes dead weight that he lets drop at his feet.

The first dazed guard manages to get his feet back under him just in time to collect his own bullet to the heart and one between his eyes in swift, mercenary style.

His heart is still racing in lockstep with the music that pounds obliviously away. His blood veritably sings with adrenaline. He feels _so good_ , doing this again.

But swift on its heels comes a new sensation: crippling horror. Enough to make him bow towards the ground and gag. He wants to purge every sick feeling he’s had in the last two minutes, but his body stubbornly keeps it together as always.

He takes in several more deep breaths, allows the shudders that rack his frame to settle on their own accord.

When he straightens, he feels hollowed out and at even keel, if not clean, not ever again.

 

____

 

Eggsy’s head lists from side to side before he sluggishly blinks open his eyes and slowly raises his head with a faint groan. Harry lets him discover for himself the way his hands are bound to each arm of the chair with not much give, each ankle to a leg.

“I underestimated you,” Eggsy says hoarsely, more breath than voice. There is a vivid red ring around his neck that is already swelling and will turn to violently colourful bruising later. “Didn’t think you’d do that to me. Should’ve known you’d do it to anyone Kingsman pointed a finger at. What happened to only risking a life to save another?”

“You’re not the innocent in this, Eggsy. You haven’t been one for a long time.”

Eggsy huffs out a mirthless laugh and then winces. “Guess that’s true. So you really weren’t just popping by to see me. You came to kill me, wield your big broadsword of justice and all.”

There’s something ruined in his voice. Harry doesn’t know if it’s because of the injury or the damning realisation.

He pads across the damp cement floor of the old warehouse he’s taken Eggsy to, some place out of the way and abandoned where he can consider his options. The chill in the air has sunk past the thin layer of clothes he has left and numbed him, head to toe. He still doesn’t have shoes and his socks are beyond salvaging. “Your activities have put you and the rest of your organisation in our crosshairs, yes.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Go on then. Bring my corpse back to your masters and earn yourself a pat on the head. Some people are worth more dead than alive, right? Better you than some thick goon who just happens to get in a lucky shot.”

Harry shakes his head. He can’t stop moving, even as his nearly bare feet sluice through puddles of dirty water. There’s an energy that drives him into motion, a churning in his gut. He questions himself relentlessly. Doesn’t know why every foregone conclusion is absolutely intolerable.

In his periphery, Eggsy watches him with a keen eye.

“You can’t do it, can you? You’ve had a dozen opportunities and instead you’ve got me tied up here like some bad gangster film.”

“I want to understand why.”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why are you like this?” Harry shouts, control snapping. His voice echoes terribly in the vast, open space, the after-image of his fury still ringing in his ears. “Why did you throw away everything I gave you?”

“You threw me away first!” Eggsy yells back, voice cracking. His bloodshot eyes shine with moisture. “All of you. Did you think I was gonna quietly slink back to the gutter with my tail between my legs? Well, fuck you.”

He could still be in that club for the way his head is pounding. Harry closes his eyes, runs callused fingers along his temple and brow, feeling where the metal grafts onto bone beneath his skin. It’s a superficial sort of pressure, but that’s all. He’s lost a significant amount of sensation there. “You deserved more. And you deserved better. But you’re better than…than this, Eggsy. You were supposed to be better. What would your mother and sister think—”

“You shut your mouth,” Eggsy warns.

“You’ve got them nicely tucked away in Yorkshire,” he continues anyway, “Is it to keep them out of harm’s way, or to keep them from knowing what you do?”

“I do this for them. I take care of my family. I’ve always taken care of ‘em, despite the likes of you.”

“Eggsy,” he sighs. He’s tired, he realises, righteous anger tapped out, leaving him floundering for a more solid foundation.

There’s never been a moment like this, not in all his life, where his confidence has been so thoroughly devastated. He can’t stand out here forever and he can’t keep Eggsy tied up here with him either. For the first time in his life, he doesn’t know what to do.

The reprieve, when it comes, is almost met with relief. The rumbling sounds of high horse-powered motor engines pull up outside. He distinguishes at least five of them. A cavalry, but not for him.

Eggsy catches the minute furrow in his brow and smirks up at him. “Tracker. In my teeth. Guess I learned something in spy school after all.”

There will be men, a lot more men, who will be heavily armed. They are in an open space with little cover. He has no weapons of his own, and he’s without a protective layer over his most vital organs. It all adds up to very poor odds for his continued existence.

Eggsy knows it too. The wounded glint in his eye is gone. The veil has fallen over his face once more, and the only trace left of his earlier hurt is the way his eyes are still too wet. “You tried to kill me. Kidnapped me from the heart of me own territory and I dunno how many you had to take out to do so. My boys won’t take too kindly to that. But out of respect for our past association and all you’ve done for me, Harry, tell you what.” He leans forward as much as the ropes will let him. “I’m gonna give you a ten-second head start.”

And what choice does he have now? Harry flees.

 

____

 

“Am I given to believe you had the target within your sights, subdued and unconscious in your arms even, and you did not take him out?”

“He was once Kingsman-grade material. He’s harder to kill than our garden variety criminal,” Harry says. Butter could not melt in his mouth.

“And somehow, during the course of the evening, you managed to lose all of my very sophisticated and very expensive equipment to a group of half-witted men who name themselves after dog breeds, along with most of your clothing?”

“Well, like what all the kids are saying these days, last night was _wild_.”

“Harry.” In two syllables, Merlin conveys a world of sentiment, more efficient than a picture.

Harry looks away, masking his evasiveness with a hearty swallow of scotch. His feet are soaking in a warm water bath as if he’s being prepped for a pedicure. In the safe and familiar environs of Kingsman, he has had the time to reflect on his earlier actions. He feels foolish and incompetent.

“If you want to be taken seriously, you’ve got to start taking this seriously,” Merlin says.

Harry looks back at him. “Rest assured, I am being deadly serious about this.”

Merlin goes quiet. His eyes search Harry’s face. “I can reassign this mission to another agent. Arthur can go hang.”

“No.”

“Then would you like for me to arrange extra support? I can call up several backup teams for you. You don’t have to be the one to pull the trigger, Harry. You don’t have to be the one to do this at all.”

But Harry is already shaking his head. “It has to be me. I owe him that much.”

He can tell Merlin is frustrated, but senses it is not all directed at Harry’s obstinance. It does make him feel better to know he is not alone in his crushing ambivalence. “Then tell me how I can help you get through this.”

Rewind time, manipulate the universe. Merlin has done the seemingly impossible before. “It will be significantly harder to get Eggsy alone again.” And that’s on Harry, they both don’t need to acknowledge. “He has a tracker implanted in one of his teeth. If I can get close enough to him again, can you get a read on the signal?”

“If I can ID which one it is, I can do you one better and take it over entirely.”

“I knew there was a reason we kept you around.”

Merlin remains unimpressed. “Here I thought it was my startling good looks.”

 

____

 

Harry does something he is not often prone to do: he waits.

He shaves off forty-five seconds from his personal best on his twelve-mile run and downs aspirin tablets all the next day as a rebel group in Syria receives a new shipment of weapons that have Eggsy’s group’s fingerprints on them.

He sources and procures two rare butterfly species from collectors in Denmark and Argentina while the Sûreté breaks up part of a drug smuggling ring that extends from Amsterdam through Paris and up through Glasgow. Five of Eggsy’s men are arrested. None of them talk.

He lays down a new bed of perennial seeds in his garden. He doesn’t actually know that much about gardening, but he hopes come late spring, there will be a riot of colour that will annoy his neighbours with its disorderly display. Jamal Kirk, a close friend of Eggsy’s and his purported second, gets picked up in Newcastle but has to be released twenty-four hours later when the police cannot find anything with which to charge him.

He dusts every shelf, picture frame, and knick knack in his home, and, in a fit of churlishness, moves Mr Pickle from his place of honour over the toilet to the ledge in the front window, where he once spent many an afternoon looking out of when he was alive. Terrorists take over the Atakule Atrium in Ankara and engage in a fifty-six hour stand-off with authorities before it ends with multiple suicide bombings. Twenty-two hostages are killed and thrice as many are wounded. The trail for the weapons they carried can be traced back through Iraq, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium and finally America, care of Eggsy’s group in London.

Arthur gives him icy glares during meetings and inquires about the progress of his mission. He won’t be given another until he either finishes this one or relinquishes it to another agent and he refuses to do the latter while he spins his wheels over the former.

“You once held the fastest closure rate of the table,” Arthur remarks.

“I suppose a shot to the head has somewhat diminished my proficiency, but if you’re worried, you can take comfort in the fact I still outscore Tristan in marksmanship, hand-to-hand, and the obstacle course. He was your proposal, wasn’t he?”

He likes to wipe the floor with Tristan at least once a week. It’s edifying for him, though the arrogant boy never learns. He also wipes the youthful smugness off the faces of the new Gawain and Kay, then offers to buy them a drink in consolation, because he can’t isolate himself from the new vanguard of knights forever (though there is a great deal of satisfaction to be wrought from getting to moan about it with Percival). To his surprise, they accept and start regarding him with newfound, if grudging, respect.

Once, he has a slip of loneliness and gets absolutely pissed in front of Lancelot. She doesn’t know about his mission, though she is cautiously curious as to why he’s been seemingly grounded in London for so long. Even though his tongue is regrettably loosened, he doesn’t tell her.

What he does say is, “I feel as if I am forever holding my breath, waiting for something to break.” Because something will. Has to. He dreads what and when that will be.

He repeatedly watches footage of Eggsy in Valentine’s bunker, both what was recorded in Eggsy’s glasses and what Valentine’s own security system had captured. Each viewing seems to contain some breathtaking new revelation about Eggsy’s grace, speed, and skill. How good he looks in a Kingsman suit. Harry can’t help but marvel and mourn for all that potential, gone.

He sobers himself with footage of Eggsy and Chester’s last time together and is troubled by the blankness in Eggsy’s face as he watches Chester’s dying spasms.

He hears it over and over again, in his dreams or when he’s had one glass too many: _I’d rather be with Harry, thanks._

And then, at last, Merlin gets a lead: Eggsy has been sighted in London once again.

So Harry returns to the club.

 

____

 

Harry likes to think that a gentleman can feel at home in any given setting, but here among the strobe lights, mindless EDM, and lithe half-naked bodies writhing sweatily against each other on the dance floor, he is beginning to wonder if that is true.

After a great deal of back and forth, he has relented to wearing a suit with a cut more modern than he prefers, if still kept in simple conservative black. He foregoes the tie and leaves the top three buttons at his collar undone in deference to the less than formal atmosphere. He is still a man out of his time and out of his place, though. Perhaps even out of his depth. He wonders if it is as obvious to others as it is to him.

He is easily one of the oldest people in the venue, and it’s…humbling. There’s something to be said for stacking Kingsman’s table with younger bodies, he realises. They would far better blend in here, for one.

Well, the most egregious way to stand out was to not have a drink, so Harry peruses the woeful selection, settles for a Plymouth and tonic ( _How the mighty have fallen_ , Merlin intones over the comms), and keeps to the fringes of the large, humid room as he scans the crowd.

There is an actual VIP section, a mezzanine next to the DJ’s stage that overlooks the entire club. Young socialites hang alarmingly from the railings and blow exaggerated kisses to the crowd below, but he can’t see far enough back to glimpse who else might be there even with the combined magnification of his eye and glasses.

He waits, and the occasional club-goer gives him a speculative eye, measuring the expense of his clothes against the lines of his face. The ones who linger more than a second or two get the full brunt of his withering stare. He’s beginning to wonder how long he’ll have to suffer through this, wallflowered to the edges of the room whilst trying not to seem like some pervert waiting to hunt at last call. There’s a significant chance the whole evening will be a wash, that Eggsy won’t be here, or if he is, won’t want to see him voluntarily.

But in the end, his worries are for naught, because Rottie finds him first.

“I believe you have something of mine,” Harry says to him in greeting, forced to project his voice in order to be heard. “Several somethings, in fact.”

“You just can’t stay away, can you, Gramps? If it were up to me, I’d have you taken out back to get your face kicked in,” Rottie says.

“But you’re not in charge, are you, Mr Rottweiler?” Harry tips his head and smiles with superiority.

Rottie grinds his teeth. “Come with me. And don’t try no funny business.”

Harry keeps close to the other man as they move through the crowd of bright young things, not towards the back offices this time, but to the cordoned off stairs. The sentinel at the gate doesn’t say a word, merely draws back the rope to let Harry pass. Rottie stays behind.

Between the bottom of the stairs up to the top, Harry steels himself for another tense confrontation, tries to anticipate hard flat eyes and stinging words. By the time he reaches the mezzanine, the girls must have been ushered away and it’s just Eggsy, lounging on one of the sofas. He appears fully recovered from Harry’s assault with no more bruising around his neck, relaxed as a lord can be over his domain. He’s wearing a different suit this time, charcoal grey, but has chosen a dark green waistcoat in lieu of a proper jacket that accentuates the trimness of his waist and the ideal proportions of his shoulders.

“You’ve got nerve,” Eggsy says, but he doesn’t appear to be particularly put out. In fact, he seems downright jovial, eyes bright, an amused smile playing at his lips. His entire demeanour pulls Harry up short.

When his silence persists, Eggsy’s gaze switches focus to his glasses. “Say goodnight, Merlin.”

 _Still a cheeky prick_ , Merlin mutters and then sighs. _Fine. Put them away if you must, Galahad, but keep the glasses running in case you do you and get into trouble again. I’ve got a program scanning for his signal._

Harry pulls his glasses off and slips them into his jacket’s inner pocket. “Alright,” he says to Eggsy and in final acknowledgement of Merlin’s instructions. There’s something about the construction of the space here that dampens the acoustics and allows them both to be heard without resorting to undignified shouting, their own little bubble, in every sense of the word. “Shall I proceed to strip off the rest of my clothes as well? At this rate, I should probably start getting them insured.”

Eggsy eyes him and Harry starts to suspect he’s debating it, but eventually he just shakes his head. “Nah. Don’t think you’d try anything in public. And if you did, there’s a lot of bodies between here and the door, innit? Figure that’s about as safe as it gets with you.” Instead of inviting Harry to sit down, Eggsy stands and comes to him, which also happens to place him in better view of the club’s patrons if Harry were considering still making a go of it.

He already knows he won’t. Can’t. At least not today. This close, Harry can see a streak of glitter across Eggsy’s cheek, possibly a gift from one of the girls who had previously kept him company. Once he sees it, he can’t stop looking at it and wondering how it got there. An accidental brush past? A hopeful kiss?

“What?” Eggsy asks, self-consciously rubbing at the cheek Harry is fixated upon. When he sees the glitter on his fingers, he smiles at it almost boyishly like he is recalling a particularly fond memory.

It’s a sight that has Harry turning away to face the dance floor instead, something hot and nameless clawing in his chest that he attempts to burn away with a swallow of gin. “You’ve been busy.”

Eggsy joins him at the railing, resting one foot on the bottom rung. “What I’ve been is lying low. Ring of marks round me neck and no voice to speak with doesn’t really inspire confidence in the troops, you get me? Thanks for that, by the way.”

“I did nothing permanent.”

“Which is partly why you get to be here right now.”

“And what’s the rest of it? You don’t seem to be nearly as upset as I was expecting.”

“I’ve had some time to think about it in my convalescence. I think we got off to a bad start—”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“—and I’d like a do-over. Tonight’s the first night I’ve had out in weeks. I just want to enjoy it. I don’t want to worry about you killing me or me having to kill you back,” Eggsy says, and before Harry can point out the flaw in his logic, he rushes through with, “So can we just…put all that aside, just for tonight? Like a truce?”

“A truce,” Harry repeats with a note of scepticism.

“Look. Neither of us can touch the other while we stay right here, just like this, with all these nice innocent people about. You’d be safe from me and mine too,” Eggsy promises. “I just want…I just want to have a nice night, Harry. Just one nice, carefree night. Don’t really get many of them these days.”

Eggsy is practically pleading, eyes wide and openly soft. The waistcoat brings out the green of them, Harry notes. His bottom lip is puffy and pink, like he’s either been snogging the girls who were here or chewing on it anxiously himself.

But those shouldn’t be the reasons for Harry’s consent. “Alright. A truce then.” Because he is buying time for Merlin. He is gaining more intel on his target and regaining ground towards earning his trust.

The smile Eggsy gifts him with is almost worth it, and a pang lances through his chest when Eggsy crows, “ _Yes_ , Harry!”

 

____

 

“You really drinking this?” Eggsy picks up his half empty glass and sniffs it. If it draws him closer into Harry’s orbit on the lounge they both sit upon, neither mentions it.

Now that the weight of all expectation has been temporarily lifted, Harry finds himself able to relax more than he thought he would. Despite being at odds in age, upbringing, and now profession, there has always been an easy candour to their interactions, something that seamlessly clicked into place from the very beginning. He hadn’t realised how much he missed this. “Your stock leaves much to be desired.”

Eggsy shrugs. No offence taken. “Why spend top dollar when most people get too shit faced to notice or care?”

Which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the club scene. “I’ll never understand the appeal of these places.”

“Loud enough to block things out. Flattering light. People come here to lose themselves and don’t pay attention to anyone else except the one they wanna fuck.” The look Eggsy gives him can only be described as smouldering, mouth turning up mischievously and lingering on _fuck_. “Gives good cover, masks a lot of sins.”

Harry swallows, trying to wet his suddenly dry throat. Eggsy is still swilling Harry’s drink and ignoring his own halfway across the table. “Ideal for money laundering too, I’d gather.”

Eggsy just smiles and says nothing.

 

____

 

“Your eye,” Eggsy begins, then stops himself.

Harry blinks. Several passable drinks in—because of course there’s bottle service—has left him with the strange, slightly irritating sensation of being able to see blearily out of one eye and crystal clear out of the other. “What about it?” he prompts.

Eggsy waves a hand at his own face, beneath his own eye. “Your left one. Not real, is it? I mean. Looks good, though! Really. Can’t hardly tell unless you lean in close.” He does so, until Harry can smell him, same cologne as before and Svedka. “Can see the camera in the pupil. It’s not…recording anything, is it?”

Harry can count every eyelash ringing Eggsy’s eyes, every changeable fleck of blue, green, yellow and amber in his irises. “Certainly not. While privacy is somewhat of a joke at Kingsman, giving them a direct connection inside my head would be a step too far, even for me.” Unless Merlin isn’t telling him something.

“I never did get to ask how bad it was,” Eggsy says. “Guess losing an eye means pretty bad.”

“Yes, it was. It was…” He struggles to find a word that could hope to possibly encompass the most demoralising period of his life. “…pretty bad.”

“You’d hardly know it now. You look good, Harry. You’re extraordinary.”

“I…it was the second hardest thing I’d ever done.”

“What’s the first?” But at Harry’s stricken look, Eggsy immediately backtracks, both physically and from the conversation. “No, don’t answer that. Forget I even asked. Fuck, I thought you died, Harry. I was certain of it. I saw it, you know? Watched you get shot, right through your glasses. It gutted me, thinking I’d lost you like that.”

“I know. For that, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to witness it.” The thought of the church starts to unfurl tendrils of panic within his chest, slithering around, constricting his heart. _No_ , he tells it, and ruthlessly forces it back down. “I’m sorry for many things I said and did that day, Eggsy. I watched what you did in Valentine’s bunker. You were absolutely magnificent. Merlin wasn’t wrong when he told you how proud I would have been.”

This time it’s Eggsy who goes quiet, before uttering a quiet chuckle. “Well, fuck me.” At Harry’s questioning glance, he explains, “I dreamt about this moment so many times. Under a lot different circumstances, mind.”

“For the record, I think you would have been one of the finest Kingsman we’d ever seen.” And to his inner British reserve’s eternal embarrassment, earnestness begins to colour his tone. He can’t even blame it on the alcohol. “Eggsy, if I had known what had happened, I would have done everything in my power to fix it. I really was going to sort it out after Kentucky. A man of your talent and skill was far too valuable to lose.”

He must have said something wrong. The light goes out of Eggsy’s face like a cloud smothering the sun. “Yeah, turns out I’m a pretty good killer after all.”

“Eggsy, no, that’s not—”

“Let’s just not talk about this anymore, okay? Yeah, it’s nice to hear you clear some things up, but…but it can’t change anything now, can it? I’ve still done the things I’ve done and you…you’re still going to try and kill me.”

Harry opens his mouth, but there are no words he can say to refute him.

The music changes as if to underscore the bitterness of the moment. One frantic song ends on a sharp victorious flourish and a cool down song rises to the surface. The manic energy in the room tapers off. The frenetic lights calm into a serene blue.

Eggsy glances towards the floor. “I think I want to dance.”

The about face leaves Harry reeling yet again. “What?”

Eggsy turns back to look at him. “I said I want to dance. Not down there, up here is fine. Gives us our space.”

When Harry can only stare at him incomprehensibly, Eggsy goes on the initiative and stands up, reaching out to grab Harry’s hand and pull him to his feet.

“Eggsy.”

“Come on, Harry. It’s a slower song. You don’t got to do much.”

“I don’t think anyone here can be accused of ‘doing much’ as far as dancing’s concerned.”

“You’re such a snob.” Eggsy smiles fondly. “It’s no fucking waltz, but at least we can…here. Like this.”

Eggsy steps in too close and wraps his arms around Harry’s waist, splaying his hands across Harry’s back. It would almost parody an embrace, but then Eggsy starts to gyrate his hips, a little too obscenely. When Harry freezes, he just laughs and begins to sway them side to side in a rhythm more sedate than the song requires.

His hands come to brace themselves on Eggsy’s shoulders, automatically resisting the rocking motion. But when Eggsy sinks in closer, lays his head on his shoulder, and presses his cheek against Harry’s chest, he finds all of his resistance leaving him.

His body easily yields, softens and curves in around Eggsy like it is welcoming back a long lost part of itself. One hand rises to cup the back of Eggsy’s head of its own volition; he presses his own chin against Eggsy’s hair.

The easiest thing he has ever done. He just holds and holds on.

Eggsy is warm and solid, always too trusting, and the restless thing crawling around Harry’s chest for the last few weeks finally knows peace.

 

____

 

Merlin gets the lock on Eggsy’s signal, but there was never really a question of whether he could.

“I would have told you sooner, but you two sounded as if you were having a moment,” he tells Harry with the pointed arch of his brow conveying his only opinion on the matter. “And now?”

“Now we see where he goes and what he does, perhaps catch a few more birds with one stone.”

“That’s getting outside the scope of your mission.”

“I was always an overachiever.”

“No you weren’t.”

He soothes himself with watching the little dot and set of coordinates that signifies Eggsy’s existence in the world, a constant fixture in the lower left corner of his glasses display. London. London. Cardiff. Belfast. London.

He discovers a hefty parcel left on his front doorstep one morning with no return address. Inside contains his previously confiscated glasses, jacket, tie, and oxfords, expertly dry cleaned and polished, wrapped and folded with care. Even his cuff links have been carefully placed in a small satin jewelry box. His old mobile sits on top and a brief perusal reveals the firmware’s been completely reset with only a single unknown number programmed into the contacts. There is a short accompanying note written in tight, barely legible scrawl.

_Just couldn’t part with the watch/ring/lighter, sorry x_

As Kingsman protocol dictates, Harry had already replaced his mobile within twenty-four hours of losing it. He keeps the old one anyway.

 

____

 

A member of the House of Lords gets caught on video snorting cocaine off a prostitute’s supple arse during an alleged sex party. The tabloids are positively gleeful in printing a collage of grainy stills highlighting the more depraved portions of the recording. Harry thinks they would have made a good addition to his collection if he had anything by which to commemorate it. His dwindling sanity, perhaps.

He debates it and rakes himself over the coals, but eventually takes the call on the ninth ring before the fourth _Missed Call_ notification can fill up his screen.

“You should try this little pub I found in Hackney,” Eggsy’s voice greets him as if he hasn’t been stubbornly soldiering through every prolonged minute of Harry’s denial. “Beer’s kind of shit, but serves the best shepherd’s pie I’ve ever had.”

When Harry remains quiet, he tentatively adds, “Call it a truce? Neutral ground. Plenty of people around.”

Eggsy’s back in South London. He was in Brussels yesterday, as he was two days prior. “Where is it?”

“Aces. I’ll text you the address.”

The Perserverance turns out to be inspirational in name only. The staff is apathetic, the beer really is shit, and while Harry loathes the trend of television screens in English pubs, it does serve to tempt the locals into a pilgrimage in order to bathe within its high definition gleam and curse at Arsenal.

The pie really is rather good though.

Grease drips down Eggsy’s fingers when he mops up some of the gravy with a piece of crust, which he opts to suck off instead of using a napkin. He’s wearing Harry’s Bremont. Harry doesn’t possess the will to chastise him.

 

____

 

“Reykjavik’s nightlife is dire, Harry. I thought that’s where all the good DJs were supposed to come from, but all they played was ‘Empire State of Mind’ and the _Grease_ soundtrack in every fucking club! _Every club._ That’s not an exaggeration. I know it’s just small bit of rock in the middle of the arctic, but that shit’s just not on.”

“What on earth are you doing in Iceland?” he asks while he flips through various takeaway menus and waffles between curry or Chinese without much of an appetite for either.

“You know I can’t answer that.”

No, but Harry knows Eggsy’s been there for the past three days, hasn’t visited the other side of the island at all, and no one else has been flagged at Keflavik. “Fine. Did you visit the famous hot dog stand?”

“No? There’s hot dogs? Let’s have it, then. Not exactly a budding gastronomy scene here. There’s only so much fish and lamb stew a bloke can eat.”

“I’ve forgotten the name of it. I’d ask Merlin but he likes to remind me there’s this marvelous little tool called Google.”

“Or you could meet me here and show me, if you like it so much,” Eggsy casually suggests. There’s a long, regretful pause, as if he could sense Harry’s reluctance, and then, softer, “We can call it a truce.”

Harry likes Iceland. Its landscapes are more rewarding than its nightlife and stringent liquor pours. He thinks about taking Eggsy on the Golden Circle and showing him the black sand beaches of Vík or the mighty Gullfoss. He’d thought about showing Eggsy many places once: once he secured the Lancelot position, once he dedicated his life to a helping the world, not taking advantage of its worst impulses. Fate has always enjoyed fucking with him.

“I suppose the weather’s not so bad this time of year,” he says.

An earlier snowstorm carpets Reykjavik’s narrow streets with a thick layer of slush that evening. Harry and Eggsy ford through it and dodge wobbly women who insist on dressing for the clubs and wearing stilettos in spite of the miserable conditions. Not only do they hear Jay-Z and ‘You’re the One that I Want’ in every establishment they visit, but a few theme songs from other dated American television shows and films as well.

“I wasn’t making this up!” Eggsy smugly says.

They do far too many shots of Brennivín and Eggsy eats three loaded hot dogs to Harry’s two. His breath smells like licorice and onions, a horrible combination, but it doesn’t stop Harry from leaning in to wipe a smear of relish from Eggsy’s lip, only to jerk back when he realises he’s lingering too close for too long.

 

____

 

The chippy shop in Dalston.

A picnic, of all things, on the Heath.

Eggsy begins to feel like the Eggsy he knew with each meeting, still endlessly fascinated with new sights and experiences, listening hungrily to any scraps of knowledge Harry doles out.

Shopping in Montmartre.

Embarking on an audio guide of the Louvre, where Eggsy absurdly insists they share one earbud each of the earphones and are subsequently forced to stick close together like a pair of conjoined twins as they move through the galleries and listen to the guide app Harry’s downloaded.

Getting unexpectedly stranded in Athens when the service workers strike, but Eggsy just shrugs and says, “Good on them. Fuck politicians. They’ll all get what’s coming to them in the end.”

It’s a sharp, cold reminder that intrudes upon whatever sanctuary these truces exist within.

Eggsy notices his change in mood almost immediately. Of course he does. “What? What’s wrong?”

But Harry just frowns and goes too quiet and Eggsy can’t revive the mood for the rest of the night.

 

____

 

There’s chatter about one of the most notorious Serbian extremist groups in the Balkans looking to score a major large arms deal, unsatisfied with the unreliable quality one must contend with when sourcing from various black markets and smugglers. Harry’s done a lot of work in the Balkans given its tumultuous recent history. Has spent more time and completed more missions there than anyone else at the table save for Arthur himself. He’s as near to frustrated as he’s ever gotten when Arthur assigns the mission to Lancelot.

Merlin calls him on his mobile while he is sitting outside a cafe in Sorrento. “You’re accumulating quite the collection of passport stamps for someone who claims to be making little headway on his assignment. Coincidentally, they all appear to be from countries where Eggsy has recently been traced back to.”

“Are you finished?”

“No. I also would like to add that if your glasses keep malfunctioning, I do have several replacement pairs here for you. They’re very resilient.”

Harry gazes at the azure blue water of the bay and breathes in the scent of orange blossoms that have come in early. It seems monumentally unfair to have what is sure to be an ugly conversation in such a beautiful place. “Apologies, I don’t know when I’ll have the time to swing by.”

“I feel I must also warn you: you’re walking a very thin line.”

“You’ve known me a long time. When do I not?”

“Arthur is starting to think your commitment’s not with this one and that you may need help with your assignment after all.”

“He wouldn’t,” Harry says flatly.

“He would and would be well within his rights, Harry.”

“Merlin….” Harry sighs doesn’t know what he can say to defend himself. He can’t. “Does he know about the tracker?”

“No, but it’s being run through Kingsman’s servers and he only has to be curious enough look into it for himself. And before you ask, no, I am not going to move it to a private server. You’re becoming compromised, Harry. I saw the signs, and I shouldn’t have let it gone on for so long.”

“Are you accusing me of treason?” Harry asks, voice dropping to a level others have described as _chilly_.

“I know you better than that, but you’re frequently associating with the leader of a criminal organisation who's been linked to several atrocities. How does that look to others? Moreover, if this were anyone else but Eggsy, what would you have done by now?”

His eyes close, blocking out the afternoon sun. The weight on his chest presses down and sinks right into his stomach. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he finally admits, to both Merlin and himself.

Merlin remains quiet for several long moments. “Then step away, Harry. Stop torturing yourself and let someone else handle it, I am telling you this as your friend.”

“Okay,” he whispers as he sees Eggsy wind his way through the crowded tables. The Mediterranean sun bleaches his hair and gifts his eyes with a verdant glow. An achingly brilliant smile blossoms across his features when he spots Harry, the smile of old friends reuniting. “Okay.”

 

____

 

The mobile rings. He ignores it.

It proceeds to ring on and off throughout the day without cessation. Harry sets it to silent.

His voicemail fills up until it’s full. He doesn’t listen to them.

Then the texts come pouring in, until the phone physically cannot hold more data. He shuts it away in his desk drawer but still cannot bear to have it there, knowing it exists, that last lifeline, like a telltale heart beating beneath the floorboards.

He goes for a night time run, the mobile in his pocket. The lights of the Albert Bridge blaze across the Thames. His feet slap across the pavement as cars drive past. The move is economical, thoughtless in that he doesn’t let himself stop to reconsider: he tosses the phone over the balustrade like someone flicking ashes off a cigarette, all without breaking his stride. He goes home and tries to remake a reality where it never existed in the first place.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry’s garden explodes into a chaotic tempest of blossoms, significantly more than he anticipated there would be, and he finds out the hard way that he has severe pollen allergies this year. To save the world’s tissue supply and his respiratory system, he has the entire thing mowed down.

When he’s fed up with the melodrama of his own life, he decides to immerse himself in that of others by committing himself to re-reading every book in his collection. Only, he discovers his tastes have outgrown much of them since he last picked them up (some admittedly not since uni). Henry James makes Harry want to strangle himself with one of his verbally incontinent sentences. He falls asleep on the twentieth page of _Ulysses_. Wordsworth and his bloody clouds can fuck off, he always preferred Coleridge anyway.

When he is surrounded by people, sometimes he envisions the detailed myriad of ways he could kill each and every one of them. On the bad days, the compulsion to do so becomes non-stop, and he takes to wearing earbuds and listening to the worst noise he can download at deafening volumes until he can’t hear himself think, and his browsing recommendations start skewing towards upcoming Cradle of Filth concerts.

Harry expands his runs to fourteen then fifteen then sixteen miles. The restlessness has returned with a sharper bite than before, nipping constantly at his heels. He runs until his joints begin to ache continuously and he has to resort to stomaching those horrid protein powder shakes just to keep the weight on.

There is a part of him that is relieved to be done with it all. It’s the part of him that likes negative space, clean edges, and closure, one way or another.

Except there hasn’t been closure. Not really. Removing himself from the thing does not mean the thing itself is gone. He suspects his supposed clean cut was not as neat as he would have liked. The tattered, fraying ends mock him. His mind still pokes and prods at them like a loose tooth. What does Eggsy think of Harry so abruptly cutting him off? He hasn’t tried to get in touch with Harry through further means. Who will be the one to complete his mission now? Another agent? A support team? Will they succeed? If they succeed, will he find himself on Michelle Unwin’s doorstep once again, this time with even less to offer? Will he even be informed at all?

He tries not to drink more than three glasses of scotch or brandy a day.

He considers getting another dog, but he doesn’t want to outlive another creature to whom he’s grown attached. On the other hand, talking out loud to one’s living pet is marginally more acceptable than talking out loud to the dead one.

He wonders what happened to JB, who had once epitomised Eggsy’s failure within Kingsman as well as the line Eggsy had drawn in the sand, not knowing he’d only stumble over and erase it a month later.

Anyway, Harry suspects JB probably now serves as faithful companion to Eggsy’s sister. He wonders if Eggsy knows that JB will always be loyal to Eggsy first and foremost. That’s what dogs do when they are cultivated and nurtured in the unrelenting exposure of unconditional love.

 

____

 

It all goes…not well, but it goes. He’s copes as he has always done.

Until something breaks.

Harry finds Eggsy sitting at his doorstep early one morning, curled up like a lost child. There’s dew smattered in the waves of his hair, and his cheeks and the tip of his nose are burnished pink, like he’s been out there all night.

He looks up at Harry and says, “I won’t come in or anything. Your neighbours already think I’m either the world’s most inept burglar or that I’ve cheated on you.”

By habit, he glances about the mews and idly notes several doors down Mrs Farthington watering her window box flowers and Mr Sutton is beating the dirt from his welcome mat. Both studiously are not looking at them.

“I tried to shrug it off,” Eggsy says, shoulders lifting for Harry to visualise. “Move on. But I can’t seem to shake it. So now I just need to know, did I do something wrong?”

Harry should slam the door in his face and alert Kingsman immediately. Instead he sighs and sinks down to the floor on the other side of the door frame beside Eggsy, drawing his gangly legs up this chest. It’s not exactly a position that comes easily to him anymore and he’s ostensibly chosen to sit on the dirtiest part of the house, barely a step from outside, but Eggsy looks vulnerable in a way he so rarely does and Harry is tired of always looming over him. “You did several somethings wrong, Eggsy.”

“It never bothered you before.”

“It did bother me. It just never stopped me, and it should have done.” He fortifies himself with another steadying breath and steels his voice. “I’m a Kingsman agent, Eggsy. I was one long before you were ever born. I can’t change it. Moreover, I don’t want to change it.”

“So that’s it then? We go our separate ways? You go back to trying to kill me?”

He wants to protest that he was always trying to kill Eggsy, but they both know that isn’t true. “No. The assignment’s been handed off and I am no longer involved.”

Eggsy swallows. “So there could be some sharpshooter pitched on one of these roofs and gunning for me right now is what you’re saying.”

“Unlikely right here. Kingsman would assume you were smarter than showing up at your enemy’s front doorstep.”

“Are you really my enemy, Harry?”

Harry doesn’t answer. He no longer knows.

“I suppose you won’t tell me who I should be looking out for next. That one’s going to be a nasty surprise.”

It’s a strange sort of relief that he’s saved from lying to Eggsy because he doesn’t, in fact, know who his replacement is. Worse still, he doesn’t know if he wouldn’t tell Eggsy if he did.

“I’ve been coasting by on luck for a while now, having you as my assigned _killer stroke protector_.”

There are practically scare quotes around the term. If the situation had been anything but what it is, they might have shared a wry glance.

He’s sickened by the realisation this may well be the last time he ever gets to see and talk to Eggsy.

“But now there’s no more safety net, here on out,” Eggsy concludes. He smiles at him, and it’s a bitter and twisted thing.

 

____

 

Harry’s been more or less successful in working through or at the very least suppressing the extent of his failures, but now it rises to and stays at the forefront of his mind like a newly formed island surfacing from the sea. He keeps seeing Eggsy’s face, the one before he leaves him behind for Kentucky, and then it’s the one just before Eggsy stands up and leaves Harry behind for an uncertain future.

That uncertainty weighs heavier each day. He and Eggsy have accrued too many open endings between them. He wants to scour his life of Unwins for the way they have irrevocably stained him. Even he is tired of the way he simmers in the stew of his own fecklessness.

One such restless night, he makes a decision after losing a stare down with Mr Pickle.

“I should never have taken you out of the shitter,” he tells him.

He puts on his armour: Kingsman suit, taken in just a little bit more after the last re-fitting, perfectly working glasses turned off, polished oxfords, umbrella. He is a gentleman.

He doesn’t know what his purpose is, returning to Eggsy’s club. It’s just an instinct that drives him, he is a salmon pushing relentlessly upriver to return to the place of his birth.

But gods does he hate that club. It never changes, a permanent night filled with cyclical bleating music and overstimulated hedonism. If he thought he felt out of place before, it’s nothing on how he feels now, like a stoic, forbidding rock upon which the wild waves beat their fists.

He doesn’t buy a drink. He leans against his umbrella like a cane. People give him a wider berth than before. He’s not trying to blend in.

He circumnavigates the room once, then turns sharply down the corridor that leads to the toilets and sees a very surprised Lancelot just as she sees him.

Time stops.

He doesn’t think, only reacts. A beast inside him snaps its wings and roars in fury. _No_.

His hand flies up and grabs her throat, shoving her back through the swinging door to the gents. She stumbles back, and he follows her through, locking the door behind him.

The music has been piped into the loo, even more tinny sounding, a _whomp whomp_ beating around them like a womb.

Lancelot recovers and is ready for him, lethally fast and agile even in her tight club dress and heels. She blocks his first punch, then shoots a hand into his ribs. He tries to hook her ankle with his umbrella, but she pivots and drives one of her pointed heels into the meat of his thigh, sending him staggering back to the sinks.

He pushes himself off the porcelain, turning, umbrella ready to bear down upon her only to crack down on a cabinet door she’s swung around to block it with, which she then shoves back against Harry with all her strength.

It gives her enough time retrieve the knife she’s hidden on her person. To raise and press the point of it against Harry’s carotid just as he bears down on her with the muzzle of his gun pressed against her forehead, right between her eyes.

They stare at each other, panting, hearts beating wildly.

“What the _bloody hell_ , Galahad?” she spits at him.

Her bewilderment seems to break the spell that has come over him. He blinks and unsteadily backs away from her, lowering his gun to his side.

“What are you doing here, Lancelot?”

She eyes him like he is a rabid animal, doesn’t relinquish the tight grip on her knife or her readying stance just yet. “I’m on assignment. What are you doing here?”

“Are you the one they chose? You’re here to kill Eggsy?”

“Eggsy? What are you talking about? I’m still on the Serbian case! They’re supposed to be here tonight!”

The pieces fall into place. Clever, clever Arthur.

“You were ordered to eliminate everyone in the room who’s a part of that deal, weren’t you?”

She doesn’t confirm it, but he can see it in her eyes. _Obviously._

And that’s when gunshots ring out from the dance floor, a loud enough barrage that cuts through the music, and everything goes to shit.

 

____

 

When they emerge from the gents, it is to a near stampede of terrified people making a run for the exits.

They have to fend off the panicked torrent. Lancelot stops to help up those who’ve tripped and fallen before they are crushed to death. Harry wishes he could be as charitable in the moment, but this vein of protectiveness he’s newly unearthed is still burning hotly under his skin, and he can’t fathom stopping for anything until he sees Eggsy for himself.

In the main room, bodies already litter the floor, haloed in dark pools of blood. Assault weapons are still being discharged in random, staccato bursts, smoke suffusing the air, and bright flares of light that indicate a sustained gun fight. The DJ stand has been abandoned, leaving a droning beat to cycle endlessly around the turntables, the coloured lights still energetically flicker across the room obliviously.

He catches the flash of movement, a gunman peering up from behind a booth to aim his assault rifle at him. The lights glint on the metal just in time for Harry to open his umbrella and block the incoming salvo, twist the wooden handle, and send back his own answering fire.

The steeped shadows and frenzied lights would play havoc with anyone’s concentration and sight, but his enhanced eye serves him well, unerringly seeking out and locking upon his next target—he can’t tell Londoners from Serbs, doesn’t feel particularly discerning at the moment—and crossing them off, first with the projectiles from his umbrella, then his sidearm, and finally the umbrella’s body itself, fuelled by his own brute strength and reflexes when an attacker comes at him from behind with a wicked looking knife.

Lancelot joins the fray, her pistol coolly picking off those who thought to take strategic advantage on the mezzanine. Against two Kingsman agents with fire in their blood, the fight is soon over.

Harry makes a quick sweep of the bodies, dreading to find a familiar face, but Eggsy is not among them, a fact both relieving and alarming. He sees Lancelot shouting frantically into her mobile, knows it won’t be long until the police descend upon the scene. He turns and runs to the back of house.

There’s a trail of bodies strewn down the length of the corridor, slumped against the walls beneath sprays of blood, legs fanned out across the floor and staring sightlessly. Some of them he recognises, either from his files or from personal encounters: Jamal Kirk, Ryan Martin, Rottie. His night vision paints them in disconcerting swaths of green.

He bursts into the office and takes in the scene like a still life: Eggsy, battered and bleeding from having put up a significant fight of his own, with his head shoved down onto his desk and the barrel of a gun pressed hard against his temple by Mateja Kasun, Serbian gang leader.

The abrupt interruption causes Kasun to raise his gun in Harry’s direction instead. He feels the sharp pain of bullets blunt his suit, and there is a brief furrow of confusion in Kasun’s face when Harry advances on him instead of dropping to the floor. He doesn’t get the chance to fire off another round before Harry bends his outstretched arm back and pulls him off Eggsy, driving his hand into the Kasun’s throat.

Kasun staggers back, gagging, and Harry’s hand closes around a pen that hovers at the edge of the desk, flicks the cap off with his thumb, drives the point of it into Kasun’s eye and deep into his brain.

He lets Kasun crumple to the floor and turns back to Eggsy. His gaze is fixed past Harry, glaring at the body in undepleted fury. A thick trickle of blood runs from his nose. There’s a cut splitting his lower lip. Reddening contusions flush across his jaw and cheek. But most concerning of all are the the way his shirt is darkened with blood at his arm and side, the tears in the fabric revealing glimpses of bright crimson.

“Eggsy,” he says, snapping Eggsy’s attention back to him. “We need to leave.”

Eggsy’s eyes glaze over again and for a moment, Harry isn’t sure he’s truly understood him. His skin is so terribly pale. Harry’s about to dispense with politeness altogether and resort to force, but Eggsy clenches his jaw and takes in a shuddering breath. “Car’s out back.”

He pushes off the desk and staggers with a bitten off yelp, clutching at his bleeding side. Harry immediately goes to him, pushes his hands out of the way and rucks his shirt up to examine the injury. A graze, deep enough to require stitches but not enough to have hit anything vital. Same for his arm. Eggsy was very, very lucky, all things told.

Harry curls an arm around him, less to support so much as urge him to move faster despite the pain it causes. Eggsy veers him to towards the same hideous Mustang from before and hands over the blood-encrusted keys.

The silence in the car on the way to Eggsy’s flat is practically tangible and oppressive, he wants to swat it away, but Eggsy favours his wounded side and keeps staring out the window, refusing to meet his gaze, even in the reflection.

 

____

 

Eggsy’s flat is in, predictably, one of those sleek, modern glass monstrosities that rise up from the tired, worn flagstones of London. It must say something about his routine activities when they stumble past the front desk with their battered, bloodied appearance and neither the concierge nor security so much as bats an eye.

Eggsy doesn’t live in the penthouse—“Some Chinese developer owns it.”—but it still takes some time in the lift as the floors tick up, fast as it is. There isn’t a key for his door but a number pad, and Harry manages to catch the beginning of the 1-9-1-2 combination Eggsy presses in with a shaky hand before he shifts and the view is blocked.

The first thing Eggsy does when he enters the flat is to retrieve a bottle of vodka from the freezer, twisting the cap off and taking two long pulls. Harry doesn’t even pause when he enters, he goes off in search of a first aid kit, using his best guess as to where the loo would be.

As expected, the kit is as extensive and well-stocked, befitting the lifestyle of a criminal and Kingsman alike. There’s even a suture kit. When Harry goes to find Eggsy, he’s not in the kitchen nor sitting room but standing before the floor to ceiling windows of his bedroom, a slumped silhouette set against the brilliant city lights, already half-empty bottle barely clinging to his fingers.

“Rottie double-crossed me,” he says dully, as if he could sense Harry’s presence in his room. “Knew the Serbs were bad news. Told him I didn’t want no part of it. Went behind me back, tried to broker the deal himself. Serbs got tetchy. Then they got mad.”

And then mindless violence. He can envision how the scenario played out as those things often do when the only language both parties know and respect is anger. He’s more surprised by Eggsy’s reluctance to the transaction. “Sit down and let me see to your injuries.”

He crosses the room and touches Eggsy’s shoulder, gently turning and guiding him towards the bed. Pain, alcohol, or shock, perhaps some combination of the three, makes Eggsy docile, pliant. When Eggsy sits on the edge but doesn’t make any further movements, Harry takes it upon himself to kneel before him and reach out to start unbuttoning his shirt. His hands are shaking too, he notices.

It’s not erotic, not under the weight of the moment, but it is intimate, the revelation of flesh before him, enviously defined pectorals and abdominals, the elegant sloping lines of his shoulders and the sparse smattering of hair across his chest.

Harry eases the material past the injury on Eggsy’s arm where it has already begun to stick, then tosses the whole ruined garment to the floor.

“Ryan, Jamal. They dead, ain’t they?” Eggsy suddenly asks. States, really. He already knows, even when Harry looks up and meets his gaze, witnesses the slowly dawning realisation of it, how his whole face seems to collapse. “Oh god. Oh god, oh god….”

Eggsy begins to shake, folding in on himself by instinct. His hand rises to press against his eyes as he gasps and attempts to choke back what maybe the vodka has loosened. “I didn’t want this. Swear I didn’t want any of this! Never meant to kill Dean. Never meant to…be like this. And now they’re dead. Oh god, I killed them. I killed them.”

Harry’s had a lifetime of experience dealing with the fallout of his own actions, has developed such thick scar tissue that he doesn’t always recognise when further wounds have been incurred, but seeing Eggsy, his pain as fresh and palpable as a nicked artery, cuts deeply into him. Not sharp and quick as to be hardly noticeable, but dull and ragged, a slow and agonising grinding down.

Eggsy has a way of throwing all his careful preparation and planning into chaos. He’s already abandoning his first course of action to address his injuries, instead drawing Eggsy from the bed down to the floor until he’s practically curled up in Harry’s lap like a ship coming to port, bleeding and falling apart at the seams.

All Harry can do is hold and hold on.

 

____

 

Unsurprisingly, Eggsy passes out in exhaustion. Harry picks him up and lays him out across the bed, then returns to his original intent, cleaning and dressing his wounds, resulting in nine stitches to Eggsy’s side and five to his arm. They’re not as neat as they once would have been, but they are passable, even under his exacting standards. Once upon a time, he had studied to be a surgeon.

When he’s finished, he picks up the bottle from where Eggsy had dropped it onto the floor and neither had noticed. There hadn’t been enough vodka left in it to have created much of a mess. He finishes the last of it off three swallows, savours the burn in his gut that, if not thaws, then at least halts the spreading cold from permeating his body.

He moves to the en suite and washes his hands again, scraping at the flecks of dried blood around and beneath his fingernails, watching the water turn a faint pink against the white marble. The water is scorchingly hot but he barely feels it. His hands have developed too many calluses. How many times has he performed this ritual? Hundreds? Thousands? At first it had seemed like he would never get the blood out, like it had sunk into his skin forever. Now he’s become inured to the soiled feeling. He’s drenched in blood, just as he walks, talks, and breathes.

He glances up at his reflection out of habit and sees an aged man beneath unflattering lights, his left eye giving him a fuller, more detailed vision of himself than perhaps he wants. The collar of his shirt has a rusty brown stain on it. His hair is loose and ragged from the night’s events. His jaw is too soft. His eyes are too hard. He studies the left one more closely, thinks he can see the ring of the lens widening and shuttering in his pupil.

The glasses, he thinks, obscure the harsh realities of himself, how deep the lines of his face are, how much his skin sags, and prominent the bags beneath his tired eyes protrude. People look at him and they see the thick-rimmed glasses and then his suit and rarely do they study the flawed man behind them.

He dries his hands and then touches his glasses, dares to turn them back on.

 _Harry_ , Merlin says immediately in a voice that bears down upon him like lead. He knows how much he’s disappointed his friend.

“How bad is it?” he asks.

 _Bad. Sixteen killed at the scene not including any of the gunmen, twenty-three wounded, seven are critical_ , Merlin lists and then hesitates. _Harry, the prime minister’s daughter was among the civilians killed. Arthur is furious._

The sword is falling. Harry can see it hovering over his head.

_He’s found the tracker. He’s assembled a strike team and they’re heading out now. You’ve got to get out of there immediately, Harry. The Kingsman are coming._

 

____

 

“Eggsy.”

At first, Eggsy remains unresponsive. Harry tries again, this time accompanying his words with a light shake to Eggsy’s uninjured arm. The touch sparks a tension under his fingers, and Eggsy snaps his eyes open, wildly casting about his gaze before blinking and focusing on Harry looming above him. “Wazzat?” he slurs from both weariness and inebriation.

“Do you own a tool set, Eggsy?” he asks. “Or is there a maintenance room on this floor?”

The seemingly odd questions rouse him into further clarity. Harry watches as a blearily confused expression ripples across his features, and then doubt, as if what he heard couldn’t possibly have been correct. “Are you taking the piss?”

“I’m serious. Have you got any tools?” he repeats, patient, but there is a thread of urgency woven in his voice. “Pliers?”

Eggsy studies him, even his weariness does not prevent him from picking up on his strained, if however subtle, notes. The confusion remains, but he blurts out, “Uh. Guest bedroom, yeah. I’m, ah….”

Harry doesn’t wait for an explanation. He crosses the hall and opens the previously closed door across from the master to reveal a mostly empty room, walls still swathed in stark white, air stale with disuse. The only feature is the dismantled young child's bed frame lying in pieces all over the floor, and among them, a sizable metal box filled with a promising array of manual tools to accommodate any ambitious home repair. He selects a pair he thinks will work.

Eggsy is gingerly trying to sit up when he returns, wincing and hissing with every shift of his body.

“Don’t bother,” Harry says and throws a leg onto the bed over his body, knee planting into the firm mattress, hand pushing him back into a mostly prone position.

Eggsy stills in surprise. His eyes dart nervously to the pliers he holds in his hand.

“Do you trust me?” Harry asks.

Eggsy swallows and finally looks him in the eye. “With my life,” he says solemnly. Means it, in more ways than one.

He couldn’t have anticipated the flare of fierce, hot _affection_ that courses through him, an explosion that is detonated in his chest and levels his entire core. It’s a strange state of affairs, to feel both elated and heavyhearted simultaneously. Eggsy’s trust is a precious, fragile thing, but it is not a light burden to bear. “I need to remove your tracker,” he explains. “It’s going to hurt.”

“Yeah, I kinda get that,” Eggsy mutters, eyes returning once more to what’s in Harry’s hand. Harry watches the fear move through him and is about the speak again before he witnesses the way resolve cements itself in Eggsy’s face and his gaze returns to Harry’s with a familiar look of determination he once saw while Eggsy barrelled through Valentine’s bunker. “Bottom right molar. Second one in. Have at it.”

Eggsy presses himself back against the headboard as Harry shuffles in closer and his hands automatically come up to splay across Harry’s thighs. He cups Eggsy’s jaw tenderly for a moment before he applies pressure against the hinges and coaxes his lips to part. The cut on his lip splits anew, drawing up beads of crimson.

He slips the pliers between Eggsy’s lips, knocks them against teeth when Eggsy’s doesn’t open wide enough. There’s a minute shifting of bodies between them, a blind struggle to brace themselves. Harry circles the cap with the metal prongs and tightens them around the tooth. He can already sense the entrenched sturdiness of it.

Eggsy’s eyes gleam up at him, a mixture of fear and bravado. Harry doesn’t know what his convey. He hopes it is reassurance, he fears it is regret.

And then he starts to wrench and twist at the tooth with all of his strength.

The tears spring instantly to Eggsy’s eyes and slip down his cheeks. A low groan of pain erupts from his throat. The tooth resists, Eggsy’s head jerks with his motions until he grips his jaw even harder. Eggsy’s fingers dig into his thighs. Every instinct is screaming at him to put a stop to it immediately, but he knows he can’t. This is for them, he thinks. This is for them.

He readjusts his grip on the pliers, feels the way the handles bite deeply into his skin. Finally, something gives, Harry can feel it, like a root being torn from the earth. He doesn’t pause and doesn’t relent, and with one last sharp jerk, the tooth is unmoored and he yanks it free.

Harry holds it aloft before him, a bloodied white chip of a thing, roots longer than he thought they’d be, before he moves back towards the en suite and flushes it down the toilet. If they’re lucky, half the Kingsman team will split up to follow its signal just in case.

But even then, there would still be another half to contend with.

Eggsy’s using the edge of his sheet to soak up the blood oozing freely from his mouth until Harry tosses him a flannel and says, “Get dressed. We’ve got to move.”

“What’s going on?” Eggsy tries to say but just ends up dribbling a mouthful of blood down his chin.

“The club tonight proved to be the final straw. Kingsman knows you’re here. I’d prefer to have that no longer be the case when they arrive.”

“When are they going to get here?” Eggsy asks, leaning heavily against his bureau while trying to pull a t-shirt over his body one handed and keep blood from dripping all over it. He doesn’t ask the how’s and why’s of it, so Harry doesn’t have to admit out loud his culpability in their dire circumstances, an unexpected boon.

Harry looks at his watch. “Five minutes, if they’re taking their time.”

“Fuck,” Eggsy spits out and at least tries to move faster, stuffing the cloth into his mouth with a wince and tugging his shirt down in an impatient jerk.

He hasn’t had the time to fully study Eggsy’s flat since he’s been in it, but as he heads towards the front door, he notes the sleek high-end features, the sparse but tasteful furnishings staged like a photoshoot: aesthetically pleasing and entirely free of personality. The one thing that catches his eye are the countless colourful drawings pinned up on the refrigerator, crude sketches in shaky lines depicting indeterminate subjects beyond the general stick figure prototype.

“Was going to have her come down someday,” Eggsy says when he trails after Harry into the kitchen and catches him looking. “When things quieted a bit.”

It’s both a statement of fact and loss.

 

____

 

There are two stairwells in the building, one at each end of the floor. Harry urges them towards the one that also has direct access to the car park. There are cameras in the lobby and very likely at each exit of the building, but only one aimed at each door to the stairs of each floor, which is easily dismantled.

They’re regrettably very high up. The stairs are labyrinthine, an endless twisting descent of concrete and cinder block, only their footsteps and Eggsy’s laboured breathing echoing back at them beneath the hum of the HVAC.

Harry keeps Eggsy in front of him, knows he isn’t in the best condition. Each step must jar the wound to his side, the alcohol and pain making him uncoordinated. He watches him sway more with each new flight and almost pitch forward were it not for his quick reach, pulling Eggsy back towards his chest.

“Steady,” Harry breathes against his ear, his own heart thudding rapidly in his chest.

Eggsy keeps a firm hold of the handrail from then on out, his other hand still pressing the flannel to his mouth. They continue on, a moderate but steady pace, scope of focus narrowed down to, quite literally, the next step in front of them.

He thinks, hopes, for a second, they may just make it, before he hears a door below them opening, and catches the briefest glimpse of thick-rimmed glasses and a pinstriped shoulder.

Harry immediately jerks Eggsy back, turns to cover him, and throws them both against the wall, gritting his teeth against the rain of bullets between his shoulders as he inhales the scent of paint and vodka-laced sweat. Eggsy shakes against him, hands taking firm hold of the lapels of his suit. That’s when Harry notices the watch. His watch.

The barrage has paused. No doubt the agent has figured out that his current position only means wasting ammo. Harry hears the sound of oxfords slapping upon concrete, counts down the seconds in his head, before pivoting and forcing Eggsy to turn with him. He latches onto Eggsy’s wrist, fingers circling around the metal of the watch and nimbly twisting the dial as he unfurls his arm, aims, and sends an amnesia dart shooting through the air where it finds its home in Percival’s neck.

“Oh, you bloody bastard—” Percival manages to get out before stumbling back against the wall and sinking to the ground in sitting position, somehow managing to maintain his dignity even in unconsciousness.

“You’re not taking his gun?” Eggsy asks as they dodge Percival’s outstretched legs and move on.

“No,” Harry firmly says.

One down, but he doesn’t know how many left to go. The thought of using lethal force against his fellow agents is abhorrent to him, even if he knows the reverse may not necessarily be true. They are only following their directive, after all, and Harry knows he isn’t on the side of the angels with this one. But if he were forced to, if Eggsy’s life were being threatened, could he kill them? He doesn’t want to find out, and doesn’t want to bet Chekov on it either.

The encounter spurs them on just a little faster, now that the stakes have fully manifested. Even Eggsy, fortified with a boost of adrenaline he may very well regret later, moves quicker, easier, bounding down the stairs, two, three at a time.

Another door opens two floors above them. Harry hopes it is only a resident, but even as the consideration crosses his mind, he’s already dashing it. The building’s mostly empty almost all year long thanks to its glut of foreign owners. Harry only has time to look up before he sees Kay leap over the metal railing, falling towards them.

He jerks back in an attempt to avoid him, but Kay manages to get a hand on Harry’s tie as gravity sends him on his way, and they both go tumbling down the next flight of stairs.

Eggsy’s cries out above them and Harry barely spots Gawain throwing himself at Eggsy before his world goes white hot and he’s seizing with the sudden jolt of 50.000 volts Kay delivers via his signet ring. The world continues to roll sickeningly as Kay tightens his hand around Harry’s tie and delivers a solid punch into his solar plexus that drives the air from his lungs. His hand spasms up, managing to drive a weak palm up towards Kay’s chin, trying to push him away.

They finally spill to a stop at the next landing, colliding with the wall, and Harry takes the opportunity to drive a foot into Kay’s knee and force them apart. He barely clambers onto his knees, limbs still not quite under his control, before he’s blocking Kay’s incoming kick and then his rapid fire follow-throughs that keep destabilising his precarious balance until it is all Harry can do to maintain a bare minimum defence and clench his teeth against each hit that passes through and lands.

Kay is young, devastatingly fast, and, under Harry’s prior tutelage, vicious. Though Harry never thought he’d be teaching the moves that would one day be used against him.

But, in spite of what some aspirational quotes may say, the student rarely gets to become the teacher.

Harry knows Kay’s little step forward and impatient rocking on his foot means he’ll come in with a hook punch next, hoping for the knockout blow, so he throws up an arm to block it and leans in to drive an elbow into Kay’s nose. Kay lurches back, cupping his bleeding nose reflexively, only to stumble right into Eggsy, who grabs the side of his face and slams his head into the wall to finish him off.

“Prop him upright, head forward so he doesn’t choke on his own blood,” Harry instructs and tries to shake off the way his…well, his entire body hurts, to be honest, but particularly his ribs. Bruised, perhaps some fractured. His knee took a good knock in the fall down the stairs. His limbs still twitch and cramp from that bloody ring. His cheek feels numb. Kay had gotten in a good, sharp jab there too.

Eggsy does as he’s told, if not very gently. He’s torn open the stitches at his side and given up on his mouth, letting the blood trickle freely down his jaw and soak up into the collar of his shirt. It gives him a decidedly savage look. Harry imagines they compliment each other very well at the moment.

“And Gawain?”

“What, Tweedledum up there?” Eggsy jerks his bloodied chin up above them. “He gets to have a better kip than me.”

Eggsy gives him a cocky grin, one that, in the exhilaration and relief of the moment, Harry can’t help but return.

The rest of the trip down the stairs is blessedly event-free. It is only when they open the door to the car park that Harry sees Tristan waiting for them, leaning almost leisurely against a wide concrete pillar, pistol held idly in his hand. Still so arrogant.

“Galahad the traitor and his little boy toy,” Tristan sneers. “Know that I’m going to especially enjoy this.” He straightens abruptly and raises up his gun, aiming at Eggsy and firing.

Harry’s heart nearly leaps up into his throat. But Eggsy, bless him, has faster reflexes, dodging out of the way mere milliseconds before, and Tristan isn’t good enough to maintain his admittedly excellent marksmanship against a moving target. His next shot joins his first in the concrete wall.

It’s enough time for Harry rush forward and grab his wrist, smashing his hand against the pillar and knocking the gun from his grip. There’s a brief but satisfying glimmer of fear in Tristan’s eyes as he beholds Galahad in his element up close, right before Harry punches the little shit’s lights out.

“Jesus, Harry,” Eggsy remarks from the car he’s taken cover behind.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for awhile,” he says, shaking out his fist.

“Sensing some unresolved anger issues, yeah.”

“Let’s just get a car,” Harry says. “Preferably one that’s discreet.”

“You saying my car’s not discreet?”

“I’m saying I’ve seen circus acts that have more subtlety.”

They round the corner of the next row of cars in search of one that will adequately serve their purpose, and are met by Lancelot, but more importantly, Lancelot’s gun, aimed with unerring accuracy between them so that it would only take a minute twitch of her hand to decide who would be first.

She’s more than good enough to hit her target, still or moving, and she maintains a smart distance between them to avoid any attempted tackles before she can stop them both dead in their tracks.

She isn’t overly-confident, obnoxious, or reckless. She’s a calm, highly capable, and very lethal agent, one of their very best.

Eggsy freezes, hands rising, open palmed. Something more than alarm, a kind of melancholy wistfulness, softens his features. “Roxy?”

Lancelot’s hand never wavers, but Harry can see a flash of uncertainty in her eyes. “Gods, Eggsy. What have you done?”

The light accusation might as well have been a sucker punch for the way Eggsy flinches. “Too many things. Bad things. I know there’s no excuse for it,” Eggsy says softly.

Lancelot’s hand never wavers. She doesn’t react at all. Her eyes bore into Eggsy, and Eggsy only stares back, as if they are locked in some silent conversation.

But then Eggsy’s shoulders are sinking in realisation, resignation drawing down every line of his frame. “It’s okay, yeah?” he says aloud, and, to Harry’s horror, he actually means it. “Do what you gotta do. Make it fast at least?”

Harry wants to scream at him.

He’s already considering his next move, how fast he can be, throwing himself in front of Eggsy or simply dragging him to the ground and blanketing him in a shield forever. He searches for something he can throw at Lancelot in distraction, just a small one, enough to change this. Anything.

Because this is not how it’s supposed to end.

Lancelot’s hand never wavers, not until she touches the frames of her glasses—turns them off—and drops her gun entirely.

“Rox.…” Eggsy whispers in hopeful confusion.

“Is Percival okay?”

“Completely unharmed, save for his pride,” Harry tells her, his voice miraculously steady, even droll, like she hadn’t been holding his heart in her hands. “He’s sleeping off an amnesia dart.”

She looks back at Harry and nods. “Then make it look respectable. But not debilitating. I’d like to pick up work again by next week, if you don’t mind.”

 

____

 

In the dingy little bog of their budget motel room, he must have stopped pushing it all back, because it descends upon him again, _with_ _interest_.

He’s sweating and vomiting into the toilet, though there’s not much to bring up, mostly bile and vodka. The spasms heaving through his body continue to roll on until he is nothing more than a trembling, twitching pile of limbs draped over the stained and chipped porcelain, gripping it like a lifeline because he feels as if he will sink into floor and the earth will close up over him if he dares to let go.

Minutes or hours tick by beneath the dim tungsten lights, and his body gradually realises the world isn’t going to end.

He regains the wherewithal to pick himself up, washes out his mouth, then his hands, face and neck. His shirt is wrinkled, untucked and loose. His jacket and tie lie carelessly somewhere on the floor. When he had first walked into the room, his skin had begun to itch and they had felt as suffocating as nooses.

He takes another look at himself in the dirty, spotted mirror and no longer recognises the person in it.

Logically, it has to be him, but the connection is not there. He doesn’t feel it. Doesn’t feel that he is inhabiting this skin or has earned the hollow look in those eyes. Fingers press against the bruise forming on a cheek but there is no pain or tenderness. There is nothing at all.

When he leaves the loo, the small room is mostly dark with only a single lamp on the nightstand left on to illuminate its rundown, spare furnishings. Eggsy is sitting up in the bed, injuries tended to and redressed, but he is wide awake, watching Harry with a quiet wariness.

“What happens now?” Eggsy asks, voice hushed.

“Now,” Harry sighs. He is so very tired. “We get some rest.”

“And then after?”

“Leave.” Because he knows staying in England is no longer an option for them anymore.

“And after that?”

“I don’t know,” he snaps, irritation bubbling up within him all at once. “I didn’t exactly plan for this.” He doesn’t know what he’s planned for. He’s stumbled across a thread and blindly followed it through this maze only to find the string’s been cut.

“What are you doing, Harry?” And when Harry can only gawk at him in disbelief, Eggsy continues. “Said it yourself, didn’t you? This ain’t what you wanted.”

“Of course not.”

“But you’re willing to toss your whole life away for the likes of me, and for what? To always be running and watching your back until the day you die? Until they catch up with you?”

“That’s not—”

“‘Cause I’m pretty sure they will.”

“Eggsy—”

“And it will all be for nothing. You’re going to throw it all away for nothing, Harry!”

“All I ever wanted to be was a Kingsman agent!” he grounds out. “It was my calling. It is who I am.”

There’s a growl to his words, he has to press them out and bite them off, because he’s choking with something else: an awful, painful vulnerability. “But hurting you and seeing you hurt, Eggsy, hurts me. Profoundly. I cannot bear it. I won’t.”

Something hot and wet slips down his cheek. He reaches up to wipe it away and is startled to discover a tear, that he even feels it at all.

The sight of it glistening on his finger breaks something inside him, and suddenly he begins to feel _everything_ , a thousand different sensations and emotions falling upon him, from the dull ache in his ribs to the sharp constriction in his heart. He shudders, he’s panting like a fucking dog, folding his arms around himself and fearing he is going to be sick all over again.

And beneath it all lurks the intense shame. For Eggsy to witness his decimation, to see and know that his supposedly fierce and put together mentor and protector is nothing more than a broken, wasted man.

“Harry,” Eggsy says thickly, and his voice pulls him out from under the crushing weight of himself. “Harry, come here.”

What else can he do? He crosses the short distance to the other side of the bed. He sits down on the hard, thin mattress, and then he rolls onto his side, legs drawing up, facing Eggsy.

Eggsy sinks down and mirrors his position, and it is only coincidence that it is not the side that bears his injury. Their knees touch in the narrow bed. Harry can feel the heat emanating from his skin, and Eggsy’s soft breaths on his nose and across his cheeks. His eyes are darker in the poor lighting, but a bright incandescence has always shined from within them. He is young and terribly old and so very beautiful.

Then Eggsy shifts closer, breaches the sliver of space between them until their bodies touch, everywhere. He reaches up and cups the back of Harry’s head, pulling him down against his chest so that Harry can feel his heart beat steadily against his cheek. He rests his chin in Harry’s hair. Their legs entwine with each other.

He finally stops shaking and clings to Eggsy as if he were the eye of a hurricane.

 

____

 

Eggsy holds onto him and it’s warm. He smooths Harry’s hair and kisses his temple and then he pulls back and the bed dips and Harry is cold again.

He cracks open his eyes. He’s dreaming, the boundaries of the world are blurry and ill-defined. Eggsy’s eyes are bright and sad, yet hardened by that unassailable determination.

 _You’ve done so much for me_ , he sees Eggsy mouth the words more than hears them. His voice emerges from somewhere else. _So much. More than I can ever hope to repay. I’m gonna to be the one to fix it this time, Harry. I promise._

It’s a strange thing to say, but the oddness of the words no sooner occurs to him before the thought dissipates like smoke. Sleep, his exhaustion, pulls him back under.

 

____

 

When Harry wakes up, the motel room is empty and Eggsy is gone.

 

____

 

“No need to muster the forces,” Merlin tells him over the phone when Harry finally breaks down and calls him. “The lad turned himself in to the authorities early this morning. Marched right into Holborn station and said he’d tell them everything he knew. Didn’t even ask for a deal.”

Harry clutches the room phone so hard he thinks he hears the plastic crack. There’s a notepad on the nightstand, top page hastily scrawled upon.

_If you feel you still owe me anything then take care of my family._

“He’ll be a sitting target in that jail cell,” Harry says through clenched teeth. “I’ve got to get him out of there, Merlin. I can’t believe he’d….”

“No, Harry, you won’t.”

“And pray tell, why not?”

“In light of recent events, the kill order has been reversed. Eggsy’s testimony and willingness to turn on his associates now makes him far more valuable alive than dead. Even Arthur knows that.”

Harry releases a shuddering breath. After Eggsy’s given them everything he knows, every scrap of intel, every name and location, every shred of evidence, he’ll be sent off at her majesty’s pleasure, where he will spend the rest of his days, too discredited to pose any further threat and therefore too unimportant to be bothered with.

It is the cleanest, neatest resolution for all of them, in the end.

“So that’s it then?” Harry asks numbly. “Eggsy goes to prison and I.…”

“Well, there’s still the matter of what to do with your little renegade act, but you have a surprising number of agents in your corner there.” Merlin pauses, and then adds, “You are still a valuable agent, Harry. You used non-lethal force and your actions, however unwittingly, have resulted in an outcome more favourable than anything we could have hoped for otherwise. That’s to be taken into consideration.”

He closes his eyes, wonders why he isn’t feeling more relieved. “Don’t think I didn’t notice how the only agents we encountered were ones who would be too sympathetic, too green, or too idiotic.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Merlin replies smoothly. “I simply organised our forces as to what was most efficient at the time.”

 

____

 

Eggsy gets classified as a category A remanded prisoner. Over the next few months, Harry learns how cooperative he is with the Yard and Interpol, answering repeated questions with a seemingly infinite amount of patience and in as much detail as he can recall. No stone in his life is left unturned, unscrutinised, and unrecorded for bureaucratic posterity, from his hobbies (he still free runs, practises mixed martial arts regularly, and had recently taken up yoga, of all fucking things) to his drink preferences (lagers at the pub, vodka at clubs, single malts and martinis when at home) to the number of bed partners he’s had (eighteen since V-Day, thirteen women and five men, none lasting beyond a week, most only one night).

Harry pores over the daily transcriptions like they’re airport best-sellers. He learns many things about Eggsy and his life in the months since Kentucky. Some things he had guessed at. Others he hadn’t known at all.

Eggsy only took control over Dean’s gang after his death because he’d been afraid they’d come after him and his family if he didn’t. And even with the sting of Kingsman’s rejection still fresh on his psyche, he was still determined to do some good in this world and use his newfound position to clean up shop at home by first taking out other gangs in London.

Under his precise and strategic leadership, the plan worked a little _too_ well. It’s hard to control an angry pack of dogs without giving them an outlet, though, and he’d soon come to find out there would always be a careful ecosystem in the underworld. Without competition, Dean’s old gang were free to pick up the open lines of business: drugs, prostitution, weapons.

He couldn’t stop it and needed the money to keep it all running besides, so therein came the next compromise. He’d at least try to make sure the weak and defenceless were spared. He created hard rules: drugs only get sold to posh pricks, weapons only to groups he thought were fighting for noble causes. Absolutely no human trafficking.

And it had worked, at least for a little while. But weapons had a way of being resold to other, less savoury types without any accountability, and drugs would mysteriously fall off the backs of lorries and make their ways onto the streets no matter how hard he tried to plug the leaks.

Before Eggsy knew it, he was holding the tiger by its tail and he didn’t know how to escape it. Not until Rottie made his power grab. The massacre at the club was the final push to convince him to set fire to it all.

He never mentions Harry or Kingsman, of course.

With Eggsy’s intel, criminal networks across the world get cracked wide open. Pockets of gangs and sleeper cells across Europe and the Middle East are exposed and taken down with record-breaking speed and success. Kingsman eases things along when it needs to, but for the most part, the official authorities have it well in hand.

Harry grants Eggsy’s last request and has Michelle and her daughter moved into protective custody abroad.

And he tries to visit Eggsy as much as he can.

Eggsy looks…surprisingly well. His injuries have healed. Freedom from the stress of managing a criminal organisation has eased the lines on his face and dark circles beneath his eyes. A carb-heavy prison diet has filled out some of the stark hollows in his cheeks. He looks youthful again, and it’s both uplifting and heartbreaking in turns. Still, Harry asks him how he’s faring.

“Not as bad as I thought it’d be.” Eggsy shrugs. “Food’s kind of shit, there’s not much to do, and yeah, some blokes tried to start something the first day but I got that sorted right quick. Now everyone gives me my space.”

“There are still concerns that an outside entity will order a hit on you in retaliation,” Harry reminds him.

But Eggsy doesn’t appear concerned in the least. “They can give it their best shot. If they succeed, I’d almost want to congratulate them.”

It’s not boasting. Kingsman has taught him well, after all.

It takes him a long time to work up the nerve to ask, “Why did you do it, Eggsy?”

Eggsy doesn’t stall and ask for clarification. He’s been waiting for the question all along. “‘Cause I couldn’t bear to watch you tear your life down for me and my mistakes. I knew you’d only end up resenting me for what I took from you.”

“I wouldn’t have done,” he immediately denies, fervently, absolutely. “And I must tell you that I’m furious with you for taking that choice from me.”

Eggsy just smiles sadly. “Kingsman needs Galahad. But really, Harry Hart needs Kingsman. And if that makes you angry, then…that’s something I can live with, I think.”

 

____

 

Despite Merlin’s initial assurances, his position at the table is far from secure. Arthur takes his time in coming to a final decision, letting Harry writhe on the hook as another form of punishment. He’s allowed to remain in his home, at least, and he’s even free to come and go as he pleases so long as he doesn’t try to escape the constant observation in the form of two minders who follow him at a discrete distance every time he steps foot outside his door.

Neither acknowledges the other until he tires of feeling like a suspect and starts bringing them tea and scones every morning, apologising for the length of his runs and extending them an open invitation for lunch on the weekdays. Sira used to be a flamenco dancer in Madrid in her teenage years. Eunji’s great grandmother is one of the last remaining female abalone divers of Jejudo. They turn out to be good company and he finally applies himself to enhancing his culinary capabilities beyond deciding which takeaway menu to pluck from his drawers.

At the height of summer, he goes on a week-long hike through the Lake District, refuses to put voice to any Wordsworth verses though they run through his head after so many years of recitation in secondary, and falls asleep beneath a starry sky, the calming scent of grass deep in his nose.

It’s the longest stretch he’s had, staying in his own house. His neighbours begin to notice his frequent presence and thus feel compelled to behave in neighbourly fashion. They come by, he invites them in for tea, and they lightly inquire about his personal life and ask if he would be so kind as to at least lay down some sod in his garden. The churned up dirt is a ghastly sight, isn’t it?

He learns that Mrs Farthington’s granddaughter has earned a place at Oxford but her grandson is a layabout whose gap year in Phuket is now on its fifth extension. Mrs Downey is the one secretly feeding strays at her back door and is coincidentally responsible for the exploding feral cat population in their neighbourhood, although she vociferously denies it.

“Is there a missus in the picture?” Mrs Farthington asks and then, in slyer tones, “or a gentleman? Because I know of some very nice men who are currently single if you’re interested, my sister’s friend’s cousin, for example. He’s a veterinarian.” She gives Mr Pickle a meaningful glance. “ _Loves_ dogs.”

Eggsy is officially sent up to Full Sutton at the start of autumn, segregated under rule 45 for his own security, though he often complains he doesn’t need it.

“Don’t appreciate the impression it gives off,” Eggsy grumbles at him during one of his visits.

“I mean this in the kindest possible way, but do suck it up,” he tells him.

He apologises to Gawain and Kay, and they are unexpectedly good natured about it, instead raving about the _sick moves_ Harry and _the target_ had gotten in and could Harry possibly teach them those things too? They remind him of happy-go-lucky Labradors, staring at him imploringly, tails wagging, wanting him to throw them a ball.

Percival is harder to win back over, but he’s always revelled in maintaining a certain level of grumpiness.

“Good luck. That man probably still holds a grudge against his own mother for weaning him,” Merlin says.

Harry buys him expensive single malts in endangered years, beautifully crafted knives that cut through bone like butter, and French chocolates to cater to the sweet tooth he doesn’t think Harry knows about until others begin to wonder if Harry’s trying to court him. It all comes to a head one afternoon when Harry enters his office bearing a tray of pastries from Pierre Herme and Percival immediately stands up.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Galahad, enough of this, alright? Fine! I forgive you. Now get the bloody hell out of my office, you twat.”

Harry smiles beatifically. “Thank you, Gizmo.”

“I told you to _never_ call me that—”

“ _His nickname is Gizmo!?_ ” comes Roxy’s utterly delighted voice from the speakerphone.

“Ah, I think I’ll take that as my cue to leave,” Harry says before Percival can set him on fire with his glare alone.

“Just get out. And leave the pastries.”

One evening when Harry is three drinks in at the pub, Merlin floats the idea of therapy by him and is met with the expected result.

Harry hisses, “If I hear so much as a suggestion of PTSD—”

“Fine, you may, quite possibly, be suffering from an ailment that rhymes with STD—”

At Harry’s glare, Merlin throws his hands up in concession. “Just consider it,” he says. “If you want to return to fieldwork, we can’t have you falling apart every time you fire a gun.”

Eggsy still gets pulled into follow-up interrogations with the Yard, and soon they turn into court dates when he agrees to testify against a various assortment of criminals. But even these demands, too, begin to taper off until, at last, the face of British Justice has exhausted all it can from Eggsy and finally leaves him to languish behind bars undisturbed.

It’s what Harry’s been waiting for.

 

____

 

On his next visit to the prison, he requests a private room, and he’s shown into a small, narrow space with an iron grate on the window so thick, it barely lets in any daylight. The room is devoid of decoration or cheer save for a small wooden table that people have carved crude words and drawings into and two chairs that have seen better days. He sits on the edge of the table and idly notes the CC camera strung up in the corner.

Eggsy is brought in next. He’s wearing an outfit he could have been wearing before he’d ever re-entered Harry’s life: polo, trackies, trainers, if in the bland, inoffencive colours. Harry almost feels like they’ve come full circle.

“This is new,” Eggsy remarks, giving the room a once over. The sudden change of setting for their usual visits seems to have put him ill at ease.

“Yes, well. I find it quite necessary,” Harry says, glancing at his watch.

Eggsy’s brows furrow. “Why’s that?”

“I’d rather not alarm more people than I have to,” Harry says and glances up at the camera just as its red light winks off. “Right on time as usual.”

“What? Harry…?”

Harry ignores him and moves back to the door. He opens it while he pulls out the gun he’d had specially concealed within an inner suit pocket and shoots the two guards waiting outside with tranquiliser darts.

“Holy fuck!” Eggsy yelps. “Harry, what the hell are you doing?” It’s nearly comical, the way he grabs at his hair and gapes.

“We have a very small window,” Harry calmly says, turning back to him. “And I’d rather you save your questions for later. If you’d be so kind as to come with me?”

They proceed down the corridor. Every guard they encounter is dropped to the floor before they can sound the klaxons. Every supposedly locked door opens smoothly under Harry’s hand.

Eggsy trails after him, still regarding him as if he’s gone mad, or as if, maybe, the whole world has.

They emerge out into the front reception, and Harry turns to the worker manning the desk under the guise of returning his visitor’s badge before sending her, too, off into unconsciousness, catching her head before it smashes into her computer keyboard and gently laying it down upon the desk instead. It’s all performed so smoothly, the other visitors waiting in the room don’t even notice anything amiss.

When Harry guides Eggsy out through the front doors, a hand to the small of his back, Eggsy finally steps away and turns on him. “What the actual fuck, Harry? You can’t just…you can't just break me out of the nick like that!”

“Hmm, well it rather appears that I did,” Harry says, and before Eggsy can reply, a black cab is pulling up to the kerb and Roxy is stepping out with a grin.

“Hello, gentleman,” she says, and like the most polished chauffeur, she opens the back door for them. “Might I recommend we exit the premises sooner rather than later? That chemical formula is designed to only put people out for a few minutes, and Merlin would prefer to not keep the prison’s systems offline for much longer.”

“An excellent suggestion, Ms Morton. Shall we, Eggsy?” Harry says as if asking Eggsy out for a walkabout in the park and climbs into the rear seats.

The gobsmacked expression stays on Eggsy’s face for the first fifteen minutes of the journey through the picturesque Yorkshire countryside, only shaken loose when Roxy reaches out for something in the seat next to her and tosses it through the open divider and at his head. “Put those on,” she instructs.

New clothes, as it turns out, including a heavy new black coat. Harry tries not to watch him as he changes even when pale skin is revealed in tantalising flashes. He catches Roxy’s arched brow in the rear view mirror and it’s only decades of poise that keeps him from doing anything so ridiculous as blushing.

The journey doesn’t take much longer before Roxy directs the taxi onto an airstrip where a private jet awaits their arrival.

“Someone please tell me what the fuck is going on,” Eggsy pleads.

“Perhaps you don’t believe you’ve yet made full restitution for your crimes, Eggsy,” Harry says, “but I don’t see the value in wasting the rest of your life behind bars when there’s a whole world out there that could benefit from your generous heart.”

“Last time I tried to use my ‘generous heart’ I got all me mates killed,” Eggsy sourly replies.

“A hard lesson that you’ve learned and grown from,” he counters. “And since then, you’ve helped Kingsman and various governments over the last few months, all without asking for anything in return. You may not believe this now, but you do deserve a second chance, and it so happens to fall within my power to grant you this one last favour.”

“What? What favour? Harry?”

He steps out of the cab before Eggsy can say anything more, and Eggsy has no choice but to follow him. Roxy’s already talking with a man who appears to be the pilot, but when she sees Eggsy stretching out his legs, she walks back over to them. The sharp, formidable look she gives Eggsy understandably makes the young man wilt.

“You idiot,” Roxy tells him before pulling him into a bone-crushing hug. “I’m going to miss you terribly. I already do.” And to Harry: “The jet’s almost ready. It’s going to take you to your new home, Eggsy. Your mother and sister are waiting for you.”

Just as suddenly, she releases him, and Eggsy is too stunned to react. His expression makes her smile fondly and she reaches up to cup his face. “A fresh start, Eggs.”

“A fresh start,” Eggsy echoes and Roxy leaves them alone to give them their privacy.

“New name. New identification. New life,” Harry confirms. “Gary Unwin will disappear from this world and even Kingsman won’t be able to find him.”

Eggsy frowns. “Not even you?”

It’s an effort to keep his face neutral, his tone carefully even. “I’m sorry, Eggsy. It’s too much of a risk for me to know where you’ll be. Everything is being organised by a trusted third party who has the means to keep you safe as well as your location secret.”

As if it had been her cue, Crown Princess Tilde of Sweden emerges from the jet and alights down the stairs, as stunning and effervescent as a ski model.

“Hey, hot stuff,” Tilde says in greeting and gives Eggsy a playful swat on the rump that produces an interesting colour across his cheeks.

Harry raises a brow. He’d forgotten about that part of the recording. Or rather, he had forcefully pushed it out of his mind.

“Don’t worry, Mr Hart. He’s is in good hands,” she says, giving him a wink that only makes Harry frown. “I’ll see to it personally. It is the least I can do for the one who saved the world and gave me good—”

“You’re very welcome!” Eggsy blurts out, looking as if he’d like nothing better than to sink into the tarmac.

“You’re so cute. Look at that face.” Tilde laughs and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll leave you two to say your goodbyes then,” she declares loftily and swans away as imperiously as she arrived.

It takes a few beats of silence for the awkwardness to settle.

“I suppose I don’t need to worry about the in-flight entertainment,” Harry starts and refuses to acknowledge the bitter note of jealousy in his tone.

“God, Harry, just…shut up, shut up for a minute,” Eggsy groans and just like that, the air changes. Eggsy clenches and unclenches his fists at his sides. He grits his teeth, then presses his lips together as if to stifle the first words that want to come out of his mouth, and when he’s finally got control of them, he settles for, “It still doesn’t feel real. This morning I woke up and the only thing I had to look forward to was whether someone had returned _Prisoner of Azkaban_ back to the library yet.”

“I know, Eggsy. I apologise for the suddenness of it all. Plans had to come together quickly and quietly.”

“But you’ve been planning this all along, haven’t you?”

“Since the moment I found out about your foolish penchant for playing the martyr.”

“Takes one to know one,” Eggsy rejoins, and Harry has to concede the point.

“It just feels like….” Eggsy trails off, struggles to find the words. “I’ve been in prisons all my life, one way or another. The last one just happened to have actual bars. But this…this, Harry…this is true freedom, innit?”

“It’s what you were always supposed to have, Eggsy,” he says, feeling the heaviness gather, once more, in his throat. “It’s what I always wanted you to have, and I’m sorry I failed you before.”

Eggsy blinks, opens his mouth to speak again, and stalls. He has to glance away to collect himself before he can try again. “So is this it? We do the _Casablanca_ thing, say goodbye forever, and I never see you again?”

The reference makes him smile in spite of the way his heart is beginning to hurt, the way it senses the imminent parting. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Harry says.

“Gods, Harry,” Eggsy laughs weakly, shaking his head. “Well. Least give us a kiss then. Feels long overdue, don’t it?”

Eggsy’s eyes are reddening, his voice wavers despite his poor attempts at nonchalance.

Harry can only nod.

He steps forward, and Eggsy gravitates towards him, until they are breathing each other’s air and his whole world is filled with Eggsy, his face, his wet eyes, the way he bites the inside of his lower lip to keep it from trembling.

He raises a gloved hand to Eggsy’s jaw, strokes his thumb along that razor sharp line, and Eggsy leans into it instinctively. It doesn’t feel like intent, leaning down to touch Eggsy’s lips with his so much as inevitability, two magnets drawn together. The kiss is a tentative inquiry at first, a way to get used to the feel of Eggsy's lips and explore their connection in a way they never had the chance to before.

Then Eggsy opens his mouth and melts against him and that connection flares up, a spiking heat of pure desire shooting through him, and _oh_ , so that’s what it would have been like. They would have been _wonderful_.

“Harry,” Roxy gently calls out, still from some distance away.

He starts to pull away from Eggsy reluctantly, but Eggsy resists and clings to him even more tightly. “I don’t want to go. I don’t think I can leave you…I can’t….” He breathes in deeply, then whispers, “I love you.”

“Oh, Eggsy. Oh, my Eggsy.” He can’t help but press his forehead against Eggsy’s and close his eyes, just breathes. “I have always loved you and I always will.”

“Then don’t make me go. Please.”

“Orpheus to Eurydice, Eggsy.”

“What?” Eggsy croaks, having given up all pretense of not crying.

Harry opens his eyes, tells him firmly, “Don’t look back,” and lets him go.

He ignores Roxy’s sorrowful glances towards him and watches as the pilot, Tilde, her security detail, and Eggsy climb up the stairs to the jet. He watches Eggsy pause at the top of them, shoulders stiff, wanting to turn and look back, he knows, but in the end Eggsy resists and disappears into the cabin.

He stands out on the tarmac and watches the stairs being drawn up, the door being closed and locked. He watches as the jet taxis down the runway and lifts off into the air.

He watches the jet grow smaller and smaller in the sky until it is nothing more than a dark speck, and then it is nothing at all as it flies away from England and away from Harry, taking Eggsy away from him forever.

 

____

 

Eventually, the world shakes off the final vestiges of its post V-Day shock and resumes the business of carrying on. Governments have mostly been replenished, the stock markets stop free-falling, some even start to experience a revival, and of course, there are those who return to trying to fuck over one another in earnest.

It’s a new chessboard these days with new players and pieces crawling into the squares, and Arthur finally gives him provisional agent status, because despite his wide streak of pettiness, he’s still eminently practical, and right now Kingsman needs every agent it has out in the field.

Harry still isn’t being given assignments suited to his caliber yet, just small bouts of reconnaissance or playing glorified bodyguard to a person of importance, but it still feels good to work again.

At Merlin’s continued pestering, he finally agrees to see a therapist, who promptly dictates he see her three times a week to start, which seems unduly excessive. He’s a terrible patient and spends their initial meetings trading shallow pleasantries or being willfully silent, but her patience could outlast a cockroach, and as the months go by, he finds himself reluctantly opening up about all of it: the church, the complete loss of control, the slaughter wrought by his own hands, Valentine, coming so damn close to dying himself. Soon, he is able to delete the ghastly death metal off his mp3 player.

He attempts to make something of his garden again and decides that for his skill level and purposes, a rock garden will do, much to his neighbours' restrained disgruntlement.

Gawain and Kay, or the puppies, as he has privately taken to calling them, follow him around whenever they all happen to be at the estate. In a way, their devotion is flattering, but their youthfulness reminds him far too much of another young man he so dearly misses.

He finds an unexpected confidant in Roxy, who he admittedly once held some resentment towards for being able to shoot her dog when Eggsy couldn’t. But with the absence of Eggsy in his life, he clings to the last connection to him he has, and Roxy is all too happy to do the same. She brings her poodle around for him to shower an inordinate amount of attention upon and shares with him stories of their time in training, so many stories he didn’t know, having been a rather absent sponsor, if unintentionally. She’s engaging and wry and she doesn’t look at Harry like the old fool he is.

Merlin takes him out to the pub or comes over and simply drinks with him on the sofa whenever the nights feel too long.

Finally, at long last, he is given a long-term undercover mission that sees him away from England for three months to break up a drug cartel in South America that has been extending its reach up into the the U.S. It’s supposed to be everything he’s ever wanted, the danger, the excitement, the chance to right one more wrong in the world.

Only, he finds himself going through the motions, can’t seem to reclaim the joy he once had for the work, nor the reasons why he should even care about it at all. His aim is no less remarkable nor his combat abilities or reflexes, but he struggles in completing the mission all the same. When he returns to home soil, he doesn’t feel sated or flush with victory off a mission well done. He feels empty.

And so it goes.

He goes to Egypt, then Myanmar, then Lithuania. He assassinates a terrorist leader, rescues a Saudi Arabian princess, and breaks through a military siege to deliver vital medicines and food to a suffering village in the DRC.

One morning when he goes to pin up another tabloid cover on his wall, it hits him.

All of it is bullshit.

Without conscious thought, he’s shredded the paper in his hands, and the sight of it startles him. But then, it’s not enough, nowhere enough. Faced with all the other sensational headlines mocking him, he starts furiously ripping them all down from the walls.

When his rage ebbs away, he finds himself standing in a pile of torn up newspaper, shaking.

At night, when he is alone in his bed and can’t sleep, he presses his fingers to his lips and tries to remember what it was like. The kiss. Their first and last. It hurts and he’s doing nothing but torturing himself, but he can’t stop. The ache is hollow and constant and only seems to widen with the passing of time.

“Nothing fits right anymore,” he admits to Merlin after his fifth glass of scotch. “And I can’t figure out why that is. I go to all my fucking therapy sessions. I complete the missions. I do everything I’m supposed to do. So what now, Merlin? How do I get things back to normal? How can I return to the man I used to be?”

“Maybe this is the man you are supposed to be now.” Off Harry’s look, Merlin explains, “Circumstances change. We change. People change us. Everything changes, Harry.”

“I never wanted things to change,” he insists, as if saying so could somehow turn it all around. “I was satisfied with my life.”

“I know you were. Look, you never had trouble holding onto things,” Merlin says, giving a pointed look to Mr Pickle. “Your issue, my friend, is learning to let go, and by letting go, I mean letting go of this idea you seem to have of yourself that you are one thing and you will only ever be that one thing.”

“Then who the bloody hell am I supposed to be, if not a Kingsman?”

“I don’t know, Harry. But I don’t think you’ve ever taken the time to find out.”

 

____

 

When it comes down to it, it’s nothing dramatic or particularly life altering that makes him decide.

In fact, it happens when he’s on the plane ride home after securing an oil field in Iraq against insurgents, with the vast sea of desert laid out below him and the sun setting against the horizon.

He glances out the window, and thinks about how many windows like this he’s looked out of, and how many more can he stand to look out of in the years to come, and the answer to that question gives him a kind of peace he hasn’t had in months.

When he returns to headquarters, he hands his resignation letter to Arthur in person, and relishes the brief flash of surprise on the older man’s face.

“You’ve fought me tooth and nail to keep your title, and now you’re just giving it up?” Arthur says.

“With respect, sir, I thought I was fighting for something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Oh? And what would that be?”

“Myself.”

He doesn’t wait to be dismissed, turning and leaving a befuddled Arthur, and the rest of Kingsman, behind.

 

____

 

One week later, Harry Hart, formerly Galahad of Kingsman, dies.

Heart attack, the coroner reports, in his sleep. The more dramatically inclined would say it was because without his work he’s dedicated his entire life to, he had nothing to live for anymore.

They would be wrong, though.

 

____

 

When he opens his eyes, Eggsy is staring at him from across the bed, hair sleep-mussed, lids still heavy with drowsiness. “Resurrection’s still a good look on you, bruv.”

Then he scoots closer and tries to burrow himself into Harry’s side, turning to mash his face into the space between his shoulder and neck while he pulls the goose down comforter over their heads. “It’s cold. Fucking Scandinavia. Fucking IKEA bed,” Harry hears him mumbling into his skin.

“Shhhh. Stop your moaning,” Harry says and raises a hand to curl through Eggsy’s hair. “It’s perfect.”

Eggsy snuffles into his neck for a moment, but then concedes, “Yeah, alright.”


End file.
